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What I install after a new Windows install

Posted on September 28th, 2007 by TomWolf

Firefox is my webbrowser of choice for two reasons. First of all it’s faster then Internet Explorer. More importantly then that though, plugins! I use several of the many plugins available for Firefox daily. I read blog rss feeds in Firefox, I blog from my browser without entering my blog admin area, I update my twitterstatus and watch others, I command my winamp and most importantly I brows with ease. Mouse gestures help me go back and forth in my history, open and close tabs and many more such things. Those features are the main reason why I go with, and recommend, Firefox.

Thunderbird is Firefox for mail. I’m not totally sure why I preffere it over Outlook Express, I just do. Maybe it’s that pretty bird as a logo instead of a boring, blue “e” or maybe it’s because I want to help someone compete against Microsoft and thus keep the market a bit more interesting. Whatever the reason, Thunderbird is my mailviewer of choice.

FastStone image viewer. Why do I want to use an imageviewer when there allready is one in Windows you might ask. The answer is twofold. First of all it’s faster and easier when browsing images. You get through your pictures a lot faster and you have a wonderful browser mode where you can see thumbnails in a size of your choice. The second, and the reason why I use FastStone instead of any other of the thousands image viewers out there, is the easy edit of pictures. While I watch a picture I simply move my mouse to the left side of the screen and I get a tools menu with options like red eye removal, crop, change size etc. This makes it the ultimate tool to quickly change a picture for publishing on the net. For me entering the folder, finding and opening the picture, remove red eyes, crop the picture to only include what I want to show, change the size to 800×600 and save it in jpeg format takes about the same time as opening photoshop.

SmarFTP is one of those programs that everyone should have on their computer. It’s fast, it’s easy and it’s essential for anyone wanting to connect to a FTP with a good speed. The good speed part I added so nobody would claim that you can connect to FTP through Internet Explorer. There are other good FTP programs out there as well but I tend to find SmartFTP to beat most of them.