PC Tonic

It’s results time out here and I’m under hypertension, high blood pressure, sleepless-nights syndrome, and I-will-fail-in-everything phobia. I just hope you understand I’m not in a position to write sensible stuff at the moment. But I really have to write something, so here’s my stupidest ever post : the list of software tools on my computer. This is This isn’t a big list (much smaller than my recommended Complete PC Pack), as I prefer every thing most things to be minimalistic, my desktop being one of them.

To start with, I have a pirated version of Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2.

Adobe AIR : My favorite Adobe tool yet; do read my previous post on AIR.

AlShow : A video player with all inbuilt codecs so you don’t have to go hunting them. It’s like VLC without audio support, but looks much better.

avast! Antivirus (Home Edition) : Keeps me safe from viruses and spyware. I can actually do without it, but you never know what’s inside an alien thumb drive. Check out the solution to avast! ’s confusing default skin.

BurnAware Free Edition : A pretty-faced and fast CD / DVD burner with all required features; fulfills all my needs and keeps me off the bloated Nero.

Button Shop : A professional tool (not free) that lets you create logo buttons of any shape in a jiffy. This is available as a giveaway only for today. Go grab it before the time’s up!

CCleaner : Not the best system cleaner, but certainly the smallest and fastest one out there. More about CCleaner…

ClearType Tuning Applet : A Microsoft PowerToy to smoothen the fonts on your desktop. It’s very useful for LCD monitors, but does work on my CRT as well.


FileHippo Update Checker : Quickly lets me know what’s outdated on my PC. Some alternatives…

Free Download Manager : If you use the free version of DAP, you really need to check this out. Doesn’t have the best looks, but definitely has more features than ANY other download manager.

Google Analytics AIR : A very useful AIR client that displays your Analytics stats.

IZArc : File archiver utility that supports over 50 archiving formats! Now that’s a hard smack at WinZip’s arse.

Mozilla Firefox (3.0RC1) : Can’t live without it.

Mozilla Thunderbird : Be ready to roll out with laughter – I didn’t know how to use an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird till a few days ago! I am still not very much comfortable with Thunderbird, but adding my Gmail account was easy.

OpenOffice.org : Using a pirated Windows is too much shame for me, so I declined my friends’ offers to lend me Office 2007 CDs. OOo ’s Writer actually works much better than Word. An OOo tip…

Opera 9.50Beta2 : Yeah I am starting to get into betas (the haunt is probably over)! I got it for testing purposes, but now I use it whenever I have to open something like 8-10 tabs at a time (because Firefox gets snail-ish on heavy use).

Paint.NET : A very neat tool for lightweight photo and screenshot editing jobs, which is what I mostly do.

Pidgin : My friends call it “Piggy” because it’s boring; and yes, it’s starting to get boring for me as well. I should be jumping to Digsby anytime now, or maybe create a Prism WebApp for Meebo. By the way, Pidgin is a multi-account instant messenger if you’re still in the dark.

RSSOwl : An excellent RSS-Atom feed reader. I prefer it to the more popular FeedDemon.

ScreenHunter Free Edition : It’s very handy if you have to take lots of screenshots at a time (applies to many tech bloggers).

Ubuntu (using Wubi) : I have installed Ubuntu as an Windows application using Wubi. This has been working great so far (3 days and counting).

There are also,
1. All the inbuilt programs like IE 7, WMP 11 etc.
2. Hardware drivers
3. Adobe PDF Reader
4. Runtime environments like Java, Gtk+ and .NET Framework 2.0
5. The Windows firewall

Well that’s my crappy list. What about you? What software have you got on your PC? Have you got any better free alternatives to the ones I have mentioned? Drop a comment and share your thoughts!

PS : I will try my best to keep posting over this week and the next. Even if my mind goes insane, I will at least put up techrolls. If anyone has got interesting articles that I have somehow missed, just drop me a mail at pctonic@live.com or leave a comment in the latest techroll post.