Fresh Format

[WantoN]

Hey fellas
Firstly, I plan on reformatting and starting again on a 150gb sata raptor when I can afford it, so, if I activate my copy of WinXP Home OEM, will I have any trouble tranfserring onto the new hard drive when I ring up Microsoft?

Secondly:
I've got my new rig, and I'm very happy. I've installed xp, firefox, adaware, spybot, spysweeper, CCleaner, PowerDVD, and RealAlternative. I'm on XP home.

I was wondering a couple of things. What are the recommended firewalls and Anti-Viruses these days? I was using Kerio and Anti-Vir before, so what's hot now?

Also, can you suggest some other programs I may want to download for maintenance, or entertainment/use?

Cheers,
Ant

 

[The_KiD]

ZoneAlarm is still a great free firewall, and AVG or Avast! are both good free AV tools.

 

[MarcLister]

You should be fine with using the new Raptor. Would this be the first hardware change you will have made since installing this copy of Windows? If so, should be fine.

As for antivirus and firewalls, nod32, kaspersky, antivir, avast, zonealarm, kerio etc are the popular ones. There is a list here about the best AVs and their scores in some tests.

As for software you seem to have most of the best maintenance stuff. How about WinRar or 7Zip for compression purposes?

FoxitReader, a brilliant and free PDF reader. Loads much much faster than Adobe.

Paint.Net, much better than the standard Paint that comes with Windows. I use this for quick editing of images and stuff.

VLC, a free media player. I use it mainly for DVDs but it can play other video files as well as audio files too. You wouldn't need codec packs with this since it has loads itself. Means you could get rid of PowerDVD.

And last but not least you've got RealAlternative so why not QuicktimeAlternative?

I now can't think of anything else you might need. Well apart from Thunderbird for your email? And being devil's advocate how about giving Opera a try? I downloaded it over the weekend and it is surprisingly good. I will have to see if it runs better than Firefox, i.e. less memory and crashes etc.

Hope this list helps you out.