The Leanest PC Pack!
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We all crave for a blazing fast, smooth-running PC that neither croaks nor gives you that horrible blue screen of death. And one significant way of making that rugged PC faster is through optimal software usage. Using multi-utility tools, removing bloated apps, switching over to cloud services – all these can easily help you erode a massive amount of usage of your resources while still allowing you to be productive and fast. In this post, we shall compile THE leanest software pack for your PC. Mind that this lean pack covers only the bare essentials – you’ll have to use your special software tools in any case!
Windows resources
Make sufficient use of inbuilt Windows resources. System tools like Defragment, Task Scheduler and Backup options many not be the best in the business, but they’ll get the job done for most people anyway. Similarly for normal disc burning tasks, you could simply switch over to Windows’ inbuilt writing capabilities. Windows Media Player can create audio discs for you. However at the end of the day, Windows still remains too ill-equipped to provide us all the basic necessities and we’ve to use additional tools to get most of our jobs done.
Safety and Security
Say no to massive “Internet / Total Security Suites”; they contain just too many useless additional components that’ll bog down your system. A lightweight but effective antivirus, a good firewall and some basic safe surfing knowledge is all you need. For the leanest pack, I’ll recommend:
Avira AntiVir Personal – An extremely lightweight antivirus with excellent detection capabilities. Worthy substitutes are AVG Free and Avast! Home Edition. Meanwhile, if you’re looking to fish out some cash run straight for Norton Antivirus 2009. Norton was still one of the most bloated crapware less than two years ago, but Symantec has greatly refined and toned down the world’s most popular antivirus. The result – Norton Antivirus 2009 is probably the best and leanest security you can get for your PC.
The inbuilt firewall in Windows XP and Windows Vista is actually pretty good for inbound protection, and should be enough for most users. More solid options are Comodo Firewall Pro and ZoneAlarm Free, though they’re nowhere on the leaner side of the meter. McAfee SiteAdvisor – A tiny plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox that warns you of harmful sites with colour codes (not required for AVG users). All antivirus apps come with inbuilt malware (spyware) protection now-a-days, so there’s no need for a separate antispyware. Office / Student Work If you’ve got a good internet connection, you can go completely online for your office work. Popular o’line suites like Google Docs, ThinkFree or Zoho give you enough space, features, and flexibility that’ll make you forget your offline suite in seconds. And you can actually use Docs offline as well, using Google Gears. Moving over, you probably have Adobe Reader for reading PDF files. Now Reader 9.0 is an absolute bloatware, occupying a whopping 200MB for just opening PDF files! Not amazingly, it’s replaced by the 10MB Foxit Reader in our leanest pack – Foxit does everything and more (annotations) that Adobe Reader does, and it’s incredulously faster as well. Media & Photos Windows Photo Gallery in Vista is well-equipped for effectively managing your mammoth photo collection, relieving you of the need for an extra tool. Windows XP doesn’t have any inbuilt photo manager, so you can get the free Windows Live Photo Gallery , IrfanView or Picasa for the purpose. Internet μTorrent is my favorite BitTorrent client for Windows, and it’s just 250 kilo-bytes! Chances are you’re using multiple chatting clients (Y! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk) to keep up with all your friends from the world over! We can’t include all these in the leanest, so time for Pidgin, buds. Pidgin handles multiple IM clients (about 20 in all), allows you to send files, hold conferences, and more. It’s open source, meaning you’ve got a handful of useful plug-ins at your service. Digsby is a cool substitute to Pidgin that allows you to handle your email accounts as well as social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Alternately you could go cloud with Meebo, which again supports all popular IM clients, and adds audio / video chatting facility as well. Utilities 7-Zip and IZArc are powerful archiving tools with support for a wide range of archiving formats and have the full functionality of WinZip or WinRAR. Adobe Photoshop is the Swiss army knife of all image editors, but it’s again a bloatware. Therefore we’ve replaced it with the GIMP in the pack. GIMP carries most of Photoshop’s capabilities, and is further extensible with plug-ins. For some quick photo tasks, Windows Photo Gallery / Live Photo Gallery is good enough, while Paint.NET is for intermediate image editing jobs. Pick your tool depending on what you do. You may now proudly proclaim that your PC is bloat-free, but there might still be hundreds of obsolete and junk items hiding in there. Small utility CCleaner will help you rid all the junk. Cloud storage Portable apps So, did you like our “lean” pack? What is your concept of minimal software usage and what modifications would you suggest in the above pack? Let’s hear in the comments! Image credits – 
Microsoft Office 2007 is easily the best productivity suite out there, though it’s large size forces it out of our pack. OpenOffice.org is a relatively much smaller, slightly slower, and almost equally productive suite that’s got it’s own power tools and is fully compatible with Office 2007.
Using Real Player, Quicktime Player, Winamp etc. together is an outright crime – they can put enough crap to gag your computer to death. VLC is THE solution for playing videos, while Windows Media Player can safely handle and organize quite a few gigs of your music collection. However for massive music data, you should grab Media Monkey or Songbird. And if you’re an iPod / iPhone owner, the Lifehacker blog has got numerous posts to help you stay clear of iBloat iTunes. 
Get Firefox. Period. Theoretically there isn’t the need for another browser in the leanest pack as we’ve got Internet Explorer, but the latter is just too ill-equipped to provide any productivity. With the enormous amount of add-on s available, you can make Firefox much more than just a browser (blog editor with ScribeFire, bandwidth saver with AdBlock Plus, Twitter client with Tweetbar, 3D image viewer with Cooliris, download manager with DownThemAll!…)
Enter BurnAware, exit Nero. Nero is just too big for the pack, and it has got a bunch of extra tools that very few probably use. On the other hand, BurnAware is slim, cool-looking, and gets your burning tasks done with no effort.
Many online accounts are offering gigs of free storage, which you can utilise to store all your important documents, family photos, music and more. They remain safe from your hardware failures and crashes, and will be accessible on-the-go. Live SkyDrive (25GB) and Dropbox (2GB) are some trustworthy places to kick off your online storage spree.
If you’re REALLY running out of space, start using portable apps. They’re just like normal programs, but don’t require any installation – meaning they can run from any storage device like a pen drive. Portable versions for many popular tools (OpenOffice.org, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, Clamwin antivirus, Foobar2000…) have been made, all you need is to put them in your thumb drive and plug it into your PC to start using those tools. A good place to start your portable collection is PortableApps.com, which provides you readymade portable versions of a large number of open source software.
