A lot of people throughout the course of my life and career have asked me two questions: what software do I use, and why do I like said software? I prefer to use applications that follow the KISS principle, excluding a couple obvious ones (like preferring Windows XP as a workstation OS instead of Linux or FreeBSD with X, et cetera). Software that suffers from bloat is acceptable, as long as the positives significantly outweigh the negatives.
So here’s a list of workstation software I use and/or advocate, and visit the home pages of on a daily basis:
- Alcohol 120% — virtual disk/disc software; like DaemonTools but not crap
- ATTO Bench32 — for disk benchmarking and throughput rates for different block sizes
- dBpoweramp — for CD ripping and MP3 encoding; simple, fast, and reliable. Commercial, but well worth the money
- CCleaner — a reliable way to keep your Windows registry (mostly) clean, and manage start-up programs
- Core Temp — for monitoring on-die CPU core temperatures
- CPU-Z — for examining low-level details about your PC
- DBAN — for zeroing disks — use 2.2.7 or newer, as with 2.2.6 its ISOLINUX bootloader had catastrophic bugs
- Defraggler — because the stock Windows filesystem defrag utility leaves a lot to be desired
- Firebug — extension for Mozilla Firefox; an absolute necessity for anyone who does web development
- GPU-Z — for monitoring GPU temperature, because nVidia nTune sucks
- KeePass — never forget passwords ever again
- HD Tune Pro — for disk benchmarking, SMART monitoring, and bad sector scanning
- LAME ACM — for anyone who encodes MP3s or does any sort of AV encoding on Windows
- MPC – Home Cinema — classic MPC has too many bugs and VLC is a sick disgusting joke
- mIRC — yeah, you heard me right
- Miranda IM — pompous authors, but significantly better than Trillian or Pidgin
- Mozilla Firefox — since IE became atrocious with the release of IE7
- Nestopia — simply the best (read: most enjoyable) NES/Famicom emulator available
- nLite — customise and build your own Windows CDs
- nLite Xable’s SP3 Update Pack — mandatory for anyone who does slipstreaming on XP
- PingPlotter — because WinMTR really isn’t cutting it any more
- RMClock — low-level CPU monitoring and feature-toggling tool
- SCFH DSF — absolutely the best DirectShow capture filter there is; open-source too!
- smartmontools — for hard disk analysis via SMART, but lacks a GUI which makes a lot of wussies sad pandas. ;-)
- TomatoUSB — Linux-based open-source firmware for Linksys WRT-series enthusiasts, based on Tomato
- uTorrent — compact, no fluff, high-performance BitTorrent client
- VMware Workstation — well worth US$190!
- VirtualDub — fast, feature-extensive video re-compressor; does capturing too
- Winamp — because I can’t be bothered with weird UI bugs in foobar2000
- WinRAR — since Winzip turned into something blasphemous years ago
- Wireshark — an absolute necessity for any *IX or Win32 administrator who cares about networking
- XviD — free video codec I use exclusively when doing AV work
