Things to install after fresh install??

coldfused · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:10

Just bought a C300 SSD drive. Did a clean install of Win 7 64-bit and I'm going to clone the hard-drive, so come next time - I won't go through the pain of reinstalling things. Before I clone, I installed the following:

Anti-Virus
Drivers
Steam
Office
Firefox

I was wondering what else everyone installs in addition to above on their fresh disk? e.g. useful utilities

lol Sorry about the two "installs" on title

Bony Maloney · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:21

Crap Cleaner
Malwarebytes
Imageburn
ConvertXtoDVD

Burnsy2023 · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:29

Bony Maloney said:
Crap Cleaner
Malwarebytes

I don't know why people bother with these programs.

Philtor · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:30

coldfused said:
Anti-Virus

Drivers

Steam

Office

Firefox

I was wondering what else everyone installs in addition to above on their fresh disk? e.g. useful utilities

Foxit PDF reader, CCleaner, Adobe Flash Player and WinRAR are the main one's that spring to mind.

Philtor · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:31

Burnsy2023 said:
I don't know why people bother with these programs.

CCleaner is excellent. Removes left over crap from installs etc and has a nice registry cleaning feature to remove unused or invalid reg entries.

Rainmaker · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:39

Burnsy2023 said:
I don't know why people bother with these programs.

If it wasn't for my weekly scan with MalwareBytes I wouldn't have known Avast IS 5 had let through a rootkit. It wasn't showing in taskmanager, and the PC was acting normally until I looked closer after the fact.

MalwareBytes is also excellent for picking up malware standard antiviruses miss. I use it a lot on other people's PCs. I don't see why you'd have anything against it?

Burnsy2023 · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:47

philtorrens said:
CCleaner is excellent. Removes left over crap from installs etc and has a nice registry cleaning feature to remove unused or invalid reg entries.

I'm yet to see any real benefit from doing this.

As for malwarebytes I haven't had malware in such a long time, it seems as relevant to me as screensavers.

Philtor · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:54

I think of it more like house keeping. Too many invalid or unused reg entries over time can't be good for the o/s.

fornowagain · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:55

Malwarebytes and ccleaner are amongst the first apps I always install.

SiriusB · 10 Sep 2010 at 17:57

Burnsy2023 said:
I'm yet to see any real benefit from doing this.

As for malwarebytes I haven't had malware in such a long time, it seems as relevant to me as screensavers.

CCleaner DOES remove old temp files and removes more than Windows' Disk Cleanup. Why wouldn't you want to get rid of stuff taking up room, especially if you have an SSD?

I agree the registry cleaning bit is dubious at best. Mark Russinovich himself has said the size of the registry has zero performance cost.

Burnsy2023 · 10 Sep 2010 at 18:03

SiriusB said:
CCleaner DOES remove old temp files and removes more than Windows' Disk Cleanup. Why wouldn't you want to get rid of stuff taking up room, especially if you have an SSD?

I agree the registry cleaning bit is dubious at best. Mark Russinovich himself has said the size of the registry has zero performance cost.

Admittedly if you have a small SSD then I suppose you might have a use for it, but its not going to save you much space.

coldfused · 10 Sep 2010 at 18:12

I have never used CCleaner but I like the idea of not having files which aren't being used to be deleted.