Back to Windows

I've had a MacBook now for 3 years and I've gotten to like it. I even changed the hard drive to 7200 rpm (by hacking a WD Passport) and installed the latest version of Mac O/S last year after the disk crashed (as it did for 2 other people i know that same week) and also had the palm-rest area plastic replaced by the kind people at Apple center after warranty period expired because my crack were experienced by tens of thousands of people.
Fortunately I was given a free HP ProBook 4510s with Vista Business when moving office telephone service package. Can't complain. Decent specs. So now i'm back to Windows and trying to get rid of the tonnes of useless software that comes pre-installed on this thing and customizing it to make it look and feel a bit more Mac/Unix'ish. I've also applied for a legal upgrade to Windows 7 upgrade program for 30EUR. Still waiting to hear from MS's outsourced reps if my laptop is eligible. Otherwise 2-3 gigs of dvd will take an awful lot of time with utorrent/jdownloader.

Here's the list of things I'm installing on Vista:

Antivirus - none!! yes, thats right. No antivirus. I just don't buy into the whole virus conspiracy thing. I don't plan to too many cracked software with keygens from hell, I don't plan to use MS Outlook so no email comes in, I often don't press the suggested link from popup windows so how else will the viruses come into this computer?

firefox , chrome - plugins of firefox

• google toolbar
• firebla
• pixlr - uploads web screenshot directly into online image editor
  

cygwin - Having spent most of my life (not sure any more) with Unix, I feel very much relieved to have CYGWIN which takes many of the standard Unix command lines and brings them to Window. Some notes about the installation:

• cygwin.bat - change shell from bash to tcsh -l
• /etc/csh.cshrc - add setenv CYGWIN tty (otherwise emacs doesnt recognize C-x C-c and instead of exiting gives an error that C-x C-g not recognized)
• imagemagick - if i know what it is i want to do exactly with an image (crop, rotate, effects..) it is sometimes easier to do it with this command line monster. for example, i wanted to use QE Superresolution tool to take 5 pictures of the moon that I took with my stabilizer-less Olympus E420 and my new 70-300mm zoom lens. So the moon was approximately in the same location within the pictures' frame. No point in running QE on the whole 10mb pictures if the moon crop is only 1mb. So the following takes the images (called "bla bla 052.JPG" .. "bla bla 057.JPG"), crop them and put the resulting images in subdirectory "moon". The command convert is part of the imagemagick suite :
  
  
  
  
  
  # foreach i ( *05[2-7].JPG )
  > convert "$i" -crop 1000x1000+1000+800 +repage moon/"$i"
  
  
  
  
  
  

security task manager - similar to process explorer but with more detailed information about the meaning of programs. Since I don't run antivirus, i need to be more aware of what is running on the laptop.

process explorer - replaces standard vista version. This nice software is endorsed by MS.

notepad++ - replaces the Vista notepad.

autohotkey - wonderful scripting language that is used to react to any windows I/O events and do useful things to make interaction with the computer a bit more customized. One important use of it is text shortcuts. For example, when I type robo and then a TAB into any text window, autohotkey script will intercept that and will auto-complete a whole piece of text "RoboSavvy LTD. 35 Broadhurst Gardens.... bank account... phone.. fax... etc." so this can be used as a signature in my email or if I just want to know the company's bank account. No need to go into contacts database and do a few hundred clicks.

rk launcher - to give my screen that fuzzy feeling of MacOS interface.

widgets ? - not sure about this. maybe yahoo, google widgets, maybe vista widgets. basically I need the time in a few cities and a multi-currency converter. I had that in the Mac with F12.

web2py - for small web site idea prototyping. compatible with the great google app engine so any such application idea can become a live site with a few clicks.

vlc - has most of the codecs for watching videos without needing to install those mega-packs of codecs that are needed in order for other players like WindowsMediaPlayer and Winamp to be able to play Xvid movies.

paint.net - a great little editor with hundreds of community plugins. quick loading of images. much better than mspaint. m

vistalizator - change/hack Vista interface language to English (used when buying a non-English Windows laptop as is the case of this HP 4510s)

seamonkey - html editor. The best simple html/css editing is done with NVU/Kompozer but they haven't been updated in years and have bugs. (actually just noticed that there's a new release from October but still in alpha/beta stages). hence seamonkey which is part of Mozilla.

putty - ssh terminal emulation needed to log into my cloud linux hosts. I love the highlight feature of putty that automatically puts the text into the copy-buffer and right-click automatically pastes the copy-buffer.

blender + python - 3D editor. Learn once, use often. I prefer 3D-Studio but blender is great too.

msconfig - built-in tool to control what programs are started at startup

QE superresolution tool - takes several pictures of the same static scene and tries to create one picture with better resolution or more detailed. One day I will write such a tool that really works towards creating a gigapixel picture but rather than for stitching pictures, it will be used for diving into pictures like in the movie Blade-Runner.

gimpshop - Gimp is a very mature opensource picture editor. gimpshop is a "mod" of Gimp that makes it's interface a bit more like photoshop

xxcopy - This is a Windows xcopy replacement. The main feature I need from it is when making backup copy and wanting to retain dates of files and directories. it also comes with a handy script that outputs a CMD shell (xxconsole) with tailored size, font and color.





Synaptics TouchPad Mouse Momentum - Adds momentum to mouse movements. By modifying the configuration of the mousepad driver (needs to be the latest driver from synaptics.com), it is possible to get the mouse to behave as if it has some weight and the screen has friction. so when you flick your finger on the mousepad, the mouse continues a bit after the finger has left the touchpad. If the mouse hits the wall, it will bounce off it just a bit. minimum setting is enough to enjoy the effect without downsides. There are other multitouch features of this driver that are nice to set and are not set by default.

primopdf - pdf printer driver. print to this virtual printer and it creates a pdf. there are many of these but the one that i used that was opensource on sourceforge now has spyware. shame.

utorrent , jdownloader - when it is time to commit the act, these tools do a pretty good job.

sony ericsson PC suite
Olympus Studio