RSS Feeds: Software for My New Netbook
I ended up buying an MSI Wind 100 LXP+ instead of an MSI Wind 100xp. I don't know what the exact differences are, but they were the same price. I spent a few hours adding my preferred software to the netbook (which MSI still calls a notebook) and I'll tell you what I already installed and what I plan to install.
Free Software Already Installed
I'm not going to get into the differences between free and open-source software. They're not necessarily the same, but that isn't what this article is about. The software I installed already is completely free, regardless of what kind of "free" we're talking about.
The first application I installed was JkDefrag. Wouldn't you know it? The author came out with a new version (still free) called "MyDefrag", just after I installed it and I just found out by going to the site. It doesn't matter to me, really, because I don't need the new scripting features on my netbook. Anyway, this defragger is at least a hundred times better than what came with Windows XP. In fact, I haven't used the defragger built into Windows XP since the week after I bought my first PC with it installed, way back in 2001.
Before I installed more software, I changed the Windows paging file to a fixed size that was equal to one and a half times the size of the memory installed (1 GB). People will argue how big the swap file should be, but since I've rarely used more than 1 GB at a time, I'm not concerned about it.
The next application I installed was TweakNow PowerPack 2009. It lets me change and tweak all the little settings it would take hours to do through the regular Windows interface.
CCleaner (formerly CrapCleaner) was next on the list. It's what I use to clean all the cruft that builds up when using Windows in a normal fashion. I set it to run when Windows starts up so I don't have to do it manually.
I installed the VLC media player, the AC3Filter and the Xvid Codec so that I could watch my converted movies during a power outage. It's a good thing I did that because we had an outage the same day.
I almost forgot that I installed Firefox. That's a given anyway.
Free Software Yet to be Installed
I didn't want to spend a full day installing software because I had other things to do. I still need to install some more free software along with some non-free software. Here's the list (so far) because I'm sure there are things I haven't thought of yet:
- Free Registry Defrag – A heavily fragmented registry hive uses more memory than one that's defragmented. Enough said about that.
- Notepad++ – Because anything is better than the "Notepad" and "WordPad" applications for plain text editing.
- OpenOffice.org – I only use the spreadsheet program, but I don't think I can install it separately.
Non-Free Software to be Installed
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything other than Microsoft Office XP. My netbook came with a trial version of Office 2007 which I'll be ripping out completely before I install Office XP. I have multiple copies of Office XP and all of them were given to me by people who either quit using Office anything or switched to using one of the many Linux distributions.
I only use Microsoft Word and only for spelling and grammar checking. My rough drafts are always done using a plain text editor. Since Word is part of the suite, I still have to install part of the suite in order to get Word onto my netbook. The netbook doesn't have an optical drive, so I'm either going to have to find a free application that will let me install from an ISO, created on my PC with a CD/DVD reader/writer and transferred to a USB flash drive, or I will have to buy one of the applications I'm already familiar with but don't own.
I am NOT buying an external optical drive. I don't like external drives and I don't want to buy something that I'll only use once or twice and store away and I don't know a soul in the Philippines who has one I can borrow.
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Personally, I love my Sammy N120. One of the best purchses i've ever made in the computer hardware world.