Essential Software for a New Windows 8 PC

Acert93

Artist formerly known as Acert93
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What are your "essential" programs for a new Windows install?

"Fixes" for Windows 8?

Antivirus?

Malware?

Browser?

Backup Software to an external HDD/NAS?

Media players? (I have a Blu-ray burner/player in my new rig)



I am getting prepped to setup my new laptop and I realized I was planning to just use what I always use. e.g. I always use Avast so I was going to uninstall McAfee and install Avast but thought, "My good friends at B3D can probably drag me out of 2005!" Maybe there is a much better option now?

After using Paragon, Marcium, and a couple other programs for disk copy I noticed there are some quality back up programs for free. Maybe the tech studs at B3D know the best?

Some are obvious, like Chrome and Firefox+Zotero. Others, like Office are out of necessity (yes, LibreOffice is very good). But after that I am pretty open to suggestions!

I am considering Startisback / Start8 / Classic Shell for a Start Button/Menu fix (I hate what MS did to the desktop!) for some of my fixes.
 
I just use the included Windows Defender for my AV. It's about as good as any other free AV program with the advantage of being lightweight. It has taken a step backwards from Microsoft Security Essentials, however, in that it will no longer automatically update unless you have Windows Update automatically update. And I don't do that as I can't afford to allow it to automatically reboot my computer whenever it auto-updates. Also it doesn't have the ability to manually scan something via right click like MSSE.

I have WHS for automatic backups.

Have Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for when I want to spot check something.

Use IE for most things with Chrome as a backup and for Flash. I have Flash disabled in IE and only use Chrome for what should be safe sites like Youtube or developer websites.

I use Potplayer as a media player. It's nice in that it includes most codecs I need for watching fan subbed anime without having to install them via some package like K-lite and has some features that VLC doesn't have. Probably not a good option for BluRay playback though. :)

Regards,
SB
 
Had a quick look on that Davros. Joke aside and baring me with the OT, that chart looks pathetic.

How come they have StarCraft added as 'New entry' in 2011. Or have GTA IV written in stone & history as no.15 in the 2010 chart of best games of all time only to relegate it next year to no. 100. Talk about changing your mind.

Sorry, move along, couldn't resist.
 
I put these on all the builds I do, and I've done a fair few...

Malware: use built in Security Essentials
Backup: It's free/paid depending on how you want to use it - CrashPlan
Media: have always preferred Media Player Classic to VLC (although nothing against VLC)
Other Stuff:
FooBar for media conversion
Pidgin for chat
Chrome (dev) for browsing - then I don't have to worry about keeping flash up to date
Acrobat Reader
HandBrake for any re-encoding tasks
Steam (be rude not to)
iTunes (but only cause family has Apple devices...)

That's off the top of my head. Hope it's of some use!
 
Don't forget windows 7 ;)

Sillyness aside, I always use as little software as possible. 3 things I always use are AVG antivirus, Firefox and Sumatra PDF. I don't understand why people still use acrobat if all they do is open pdf files.
 
Logitech setpoint driver, for my G700 mouse. This is a must, since windows has no standardized way of recognizing more than 5 mouse buttons (which is shit, but what can you do.)

Steam, or else almost my entire games library is unavailable to me. World of Warcraft is also mandated, since I'm deeply addicted, lol. I don't play that much anymore, but I rarely stay away from the game for too long, a couple days at most usually. Also, other Blizzard games.

7Zip, mostly for its Benchmark mode, which I use as a diagnostic tool, although there's better ones out there such as Prime95 etc. Other small utilities: CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWMonitor.

Winamp, for listening to tracker modules.

MS Security Essentials would have been mandated install, except win8 includes a (slightly gimped) version from out of the box.
 
Some are free, some are payware. The multimedia stuff I use on a Win7 HTPC so might not exactly work the same on Win8 MCE version, but they claim to work.

AntiVirus - Eset NOD32
MalWare - SpyBot Search & Destroy
Archival - 7Zip
DVD Burning - ImgBurn
Shell/Telnet - Putty

MultiMedia - AnyDVD HD (removes HDCP requirements for my DVI monitors)
MultiMedia - Media Player Classic Home-Cinema for simple player
MultiMedia - for Windows MCE I use Sharks007 Codecs, MediaBrowser version 2, and Media Center Master

Misc - Core Temp (with Logitech G15 plugin)
PDF Reading - Absolutely avoid Adobe Acrobat Reader, try FoxIt
 
What are your "essential" programs for a new Windows install?

No need for antivirus or firewall as the built-in ones are good enough. Here's some I install on my PCs:

7zip: Handles ZIPs, RARs etc etc.
Notepad++: Notepad replacement
Mozilla Thunderbird: Email
Chrome

And that's about it, if we exclude all the programming stuff.
 
The IMO most essential link when setting things up:
https://ninite.com/

Just pick and choose, get your installer and you're done.

EDIT:
Argh, what did they do with their layout?
I don't really like this checkbox forest...
 
PDF Reading - Absolutely avoid Adobe Acrobat Reader, try FoxIt
WORD! Heh, forgot all about that. Foxit is a required install, even though I hardly ever read PDFs you still need a reader when you need it, and I know of nothing better. Was a metric shit ton of crapware included with the latest version I downloaded though, although fortunately you could just uncheck the boxes when asked if you'd like to install ask.com toolbar and whatever the fuck else it was. Hopefully it respected my wishes, not that I've seen any extra toolbars pop up in my browser though...
 
IrfanView for viewing images and some light cutting, cropping, resizing work.

Winamp Lite with the basic, no-frills interface and basically nothing but audio playback checked on installation.

Firefox for my browser, only a few extensions/plug-ins being used.

Foxit Reader for PDF's. Firefox can now do PDF's on its own so I no longer set Foxit as a plug-in.

An offline version of Java with no browser plug-in enabled. I need it only because it's essential in order to use the AMDDownsamplingGui. That utility allows me to add a resolution like 2560 x 1440 to video games or my desktop.

Adrenaline Crysis 2 Benchmark Tool. You need Crysis 2 for it to work. They also make other benchmarks.

Kindle, it works well.

Perfect Disk 12.5 disk defragmenter (Home). I got it during one of their frequent sales, a 3 PC license. I use two and my brother in law got the third. It's now a pretty refined product. It has some advanced features.

MPC Home Cinema and The VLC Player. By default MPC HC uses hardware acceleration and The VLC Player doesn't so I use the VLC Player when I'm Folding at Home and have my gpu downclocked to 650 MHz. Using MPC HC to play most video files, while I'm folding, kicks in full gpu clocks. That's odd because normally I'd see the gpu at 500 MHz for HA of videos.

MSI Afterburner to set my gpu clocks and voltage.

MediaInfo - http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

"MediaInfo is a convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files." It's pretty easy to set up under Preferences. I prefer letting it output its results in a text format.

SpywareBlaster, an oldie but a goodie. It basically just adds lists of sites to block for your browsers. It can kill flash and it has a few other features.

ImgBurn for burning disks.
 
Don't forget windows 7 ;)

Sillyness aside, I always use as little software as possible. 3 things I always use are AVG antivirus, Firefox and Sumatra PDF. I don't understand why people still use acrobat if all they do is open pdf files.

AVG was really nice, it never bugged you and stayed really free (as in freeware) but the 2013 version bugs you and disables itself.
Is there a new reference in terms of antivirus that doesn't bug you? or maybe you do pay for it.
When you go to AVG's uninstaller there's an option to "revert" to a previous version to not get bugged, so I did that. It's on a couple computers I don't own, I don't have Windows on mine. Dunno if that works and for how long.

Microsoft AV seems to be an option at least (with the limitations that Silent Buddha tells about. It would be useful to be able to scan things, like e.g. a set of dubious VST files)
 
To read pdf files, you can use evince as well (Gnome 2's pdf reader). It lacks any nonsense like useless toolbars or reminder to get a paid version, and works.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

I second Winamp for playing music files (on linux I now use "deadbeef")

MPC is nice, VLC is nice too, it's personal preference. VLC is "self-contained" and really cross-platform.

Izarc does the same thing as 7zip, and really feels like Winrar when using the shell integration. So I like it very much (else you can probably still use Winrar and click on the warning every time, lol. I probably did that for 7 years)

If you need Putty, have Xming : you can launch remote graphical applications from putty's command line and they magically appear on your desktop, behaving like a regular window (in the task bar, etc. Dunno if they can put an icon in the tray, that's possible in linux/unix with ssh -X at least).
TeraTerm Pro is another piece of software that does the same job as Putty.

Cubic Explorer is an alternate file manager you can use if you want tabs and wasting less screen space than the Vista/7/8 file manager.
 
7zip (better than the other options)
vlc (simple to use, like MPCHC)
sumatraPDF (very light weight, works really well)
hwinfo64 (a lot of information and great temperature sensors)
dxtory (best software I found for video capture and framerate lock)
CCleaner (quick way to clean temporary files and more)
 
AVG was really nice, it never bugged you and stayed really free (as in freeware) but the 2013 version bugs you and disables itself.
Is there a new reference in terms of antivirus that doesn't bug you? or maybe you do pay for it.
When you go to AVG's uninstaller there's an option to "revert" to a previous version to not get bugged, so I did that. It's on a couple computers I don't own, I don't have Windows on mine. Dunno if that works and for how long.

Microsoft AV seems to be an option at least (with the limitations that Silent Buddha tells about. It would be useful to be able to scan things, like e.g. a set of dubious VST files)

I used the free version of AVG up until around 2008 or 2009 when it became a more "bloated"/system intensive than it had been in the past. And around the same time independent testing had shown that MSSE was generally slightly better than other free A/V products at the time (although each A/V suite would catch things that the other's wouldn't) with lower system resource useage.

I wish MSSE was available for Win8 as the Windows Defender in Win8 isn't as feature rich as MSSE although it contains the same virus scanning/recognition engine.

Regards,
SB
 
Scanning folders can be done manually within Windows Defender by using "Custom" and then picking the folder to scan.

http://www.howtogeek.com/130013/how-scan-any-file-or-folder-using-windows-8s-built-in-anti-virus/

http://www.howtogeek.com/137083/how...ws-defender-to-the-context-menu-in-windows-8/

Second method only works with folders. First method does indeed add the ability to use the context menu to scan an individual file. It's just a tad less seamless than I was hoping. And I don't know if the whole "shell:sendto" part was needed.

Afaik no file can appear on my PC without having been scanned but having the option to force a scan, given how nasty some code can be, is nice.
 
Scanning folders can be done manually within Windows Defender by using "Custom" and then picking the folder to scan.

http://www.howtogeek.com/130013/how-scan-any-file-or-folder-using-windows-8s-built-in-anti-virus/

http://www.howtogeek.com/137083/how...ws-defender-to-the-context-menu-in-windows-8/

Second method only works with folders. First method does indeed add the ability to use the context menu to scan an individual file. It's just a tad less seamless than I was hoping. And I don't know if the whole "shell:sendto" part was needed.

Afaik no file can appear on my PC without having been scanned but having the option to force a scan, given how nasty some code can be, is nice.

Wooo, awesome, thanks for that. The integration into the context menu to scan a file was the one major thing I missed about not having MSSE.

This solution isn't optimal but it is better than nothing.

Regards,
SB
 
Wooo, awesome, thanks for that. The integration into the context menu to scan a file was the one major thing I missed about not having MSSE.

This solution isn't optimal but it is better than nothing.

Regards,
SB

My pleasure. As a fellow user of Windows 8 you might encounter an issue with system file checker. I did and by something not far from blind luck I hit on a link that saved me from doing an image restore.

Damit S [MSFT] replied on
Microsoft

We’re aware of an issue impacting some Windows 8 customers trying to run the sfc /scannow command after installing KB2821895, where customers using the System File Checker receive an error message that there are corrupt files and that the system requires a restart to repair the files.

To work around this issue:
· Open an elevated command window
· Run the command dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth, and wait for this command to complete.
· Run the sfc /scannow command again until the command completes and reports that there is no corruption. If you still get an error that there is corruption, you should contact technical support for further assistance as your system may have actual corruption.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...m/eed54c3d-37c2-4965-8974-3f323b4e8e24?page=4

There's also another tricky situation that some are reporting. After a Windows Update or disk cleanup you might find Windows seemingly stalled. It isn't, it's just compressing some files in order to get them using the new, superior, compression algorithm of Windows 8.1.

That's cool but the sfc issue is egg on MS's face imo. I'm guessing that everyone can just ignore it and MS will issue a silent fix with a Windows update. They are probably triple checking the fix, for obvious reasons. :)
 
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