Software Setup.

[thablkpanda]

Yo,

I've noticed companies like Microsoft and stuff have been concerning themselves more and more with using up what little ram most of us have.

There's a quick fix. Get your s*** to do what it's supposed to - and that's it.

Most third party freeware and stuff does exactly that. So we're going to trade links and crap.

Media Players

Foobar 2000

This is My first substitute for Windows Media Player and Winamp. I can't stand how our Media players these days hog ram and CPU stuff like a mofo. Foobar's playing one of my largest playlists as I type this- and It's using 3k kb of ram. In comparison, from time to time WMP uses 15k kb, to 20k. That's one helluva drop. Foobar concentrates on playing music. That's it. No fancy visualisations and pretty interfaces that nobody needs. This is simple.

VLC Media Player

This is the second half of my WMP/Winamp replacement series. Video/Audio is what this thing covers- and damn does it cover it well. Out of the box, it supports almost all generic (and some exotic) media formats, including ones you'd normally need codecs for. Avi, XvID and all that other 3/4 letter acronyms I've got covered. This is the player you can count on. And again, low ram consumption is a must.

This also doubles as a media streamer, I've yet to try that out yet. Simple player.

Office Suites

I know we can all get Microsoft Office for free if we WANTED to- but who really wants to?

OpenOffice.org

Open Office breaks the barrier when I try to keep ram consumption low- this is a ram hog. But when you don't want to pay for Microsoft Office, or any other 'replacements' this is the s***. Includes a Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint replacements- 'Draw' their one of a kind thing- is like an upgraded 'Paint' just not yet a Photoshop.. Know what I mean?

This is an all around good system. If you're a Microsoftphobic sufferer, this is definitely going to help you keep Windows' presence on your computer low.

PHP/Web Designers

The apt-named PHP Designer 2006 is all that belongs in this section. Best in it's class- with side and front 5 star crash test ratings... No, I was just making sure you're paying attention.

PHP Designer 2006

This is, again, simple. I'm not trying to insult anyone- but who needs all the unnecessary gadgetry and stuff dangling from your PHP Designer? PHP is complicated enough as it is- you don't want your coder to be as difficult to deal with. This includes syntax highlighters, bracket completers, code completers, It's just notepad- on steroids. Making your coding just that easier.

Specific Filetype Readers

Foxit Reader

I've never hated any company more than Adobe. Now that they bought out my favorite company - Macromedia - they're right there on my hit list.

Everyone releases crap in .PDF format, like it's some fix-all for everything. PDFs suck. If you're going to have a readme file or anything- use .txt- or something that opens too easily. PDFs piss me off.

Foxit reader is another RAM conserving product- that doesn't pester the hell out of you like Adobe Reader does. Foxit is the shiz.

System Tweakers

CableNut

I honestly don't care what ISP you use- or what type of connection you have. Cablenut speeds it up beyond anything you can imagine. A good internet connection speed testing site is Testmy.net, they provide an unbiased review of your connection speed based upon a download and upload test. Do your test before installing this program.

Install cablenut- and for the computer illiterate, it may require some tinkering. Read the readmes, and find out what really applys to you. The computer literate will scoff at the readme, and preform the tasks like they were born with knowledge of this program.

Update your system or whatever it says, and re-test your system. I gurantee you'll score much higher on the testmy.net system than before. Pages will load MUCH faster- it's a godsend.

FasterFox

Firstly, If you're not using Firefox- throw something through your computer screen (and if you're still using a CRT screen, then you've just benefited yourself, believe it or not).

Go out and get an LCD screen, and install Firefox. IE sucks. It does.

Then install FasterFox. It speeds up your Firefox browser by tinkering stuff on the inside. Pretty much, in laymans terms, you're making firefox make more connections to a website then it normally would, and downloading things that much faster. I could say it in coolmans terms- but I'd type too long.

Set Fasterfox to 'Optimised' or 'Turbo-Charged' and watch preformace soar. Some websites that you frequent- might find out that you're increasing the load to their servers (requesting their site 100 times - to view it once, only to decrease your load time) and seek to slap you around about it. I'll be nice and use Optimised most of the time, but when I'm just surfing, I switch to Turbo Charged- wikipedia can handle the bandwidth.



I'm tired of typing.. Someone give me some more stuff. Freeware, Shareware, we can get it all for free- holla at me, and we'll add it to our list. Remember, only useful stuff please. STORMY- we don't want constant updates of Blender, because nobody uses it but you!! LOL- just playin man, but really- I want stuff that laymen, and regular people use. General software, nothing too specalized. (i.e. Photoshop's fine, but Blender is a specific 3d graphics creator- taking it too far for our purposes).

HOLLA-

Christopher D. Merchant
Merchant Enterprises

[dm-horus]

this is the kind of stuff i like to collect. alot of software designers are obsessed with packing in as many features as they can into their program bundle and not so much on performance. ive been reading some articles and a couple books about programming and software design as art; writing programs to work efficiently and cleanly and to focus on performance and ease of use instead of on addons and chowing down ram.

its pretty ludicrous when a simple sound player requires you to update your video drivers hence the reason why windows software has such a hard time with backward compatability. in my mind, something like winamp should work on windows 95 or even 3.1.

Good work, post more as you find them.

[Leviathan]

good post

i mite post some links sometime

[BlackBox]

I use winamp for mp3 playback, it doesn't hog too much memory on my machine. It sucks for videos though.

I use VLC for videos, BSplayer is also a good vid player as well.

OpenOffice I don't have many complaints about, other than it's widespread use of java (yuck). But, why switch if I already have MS Office 2003 enterprise installed on my computer?

As for writing code, if it's C/C++ I generally use Codeblocks. (Of course, I picked it out for the free compiler )
If it's PHP or something else, I use TextPad (not that I absolutely love TextPad but I got it for free from my university so I can't complain. It's pretty good at what it does). (I can't stand tools that automatically open and close your braces for you. Syntax highlighting and code completion is as far as I can go. )

Pretty interesting apps tho!