Trying to go all freeware

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 12:15

On my new rig I've tried going down the freeware route as much as possible with the exception of windows. So far I've covered the basics:

Open Office
Avast! Antivirus
Firefox
Foxit PDF
ImgBurn DVD burning

The only thing that I'm really stuck on is WinRAR. Are there any free apps that can compress to rar? I know there are a few that can unpack existing files.

Has anyone else tried doing this? How did you get on?

apatia77 · 8 Mar 2009 at 12:16

I think you want 7-zip instead of winrar

but it doesnt compress to rar i think

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 12:20

Yeah 7-zip is a good prog. I think the issue is that the rar format is still patented and the software company has to pay winrar for the licence so they at least need to pass this cost on.

What about media playback? I'm using Media Player Classic (the open source one) and K-Lite codec pack.

swinnie · 8 Mar 2009 at 12:35

For media playback, I'd use Winamp for music, and VLC for video.

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 12:49

Thanks I'll give VLC a go. I've heard others recommend it but I never bothered to change on my old system.

Ricki · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:04

I commend you for doing this - something I've been wanting to do for a long time! I just can never get on with OpenOffice, it just falls so far behind MS Office in every respect.

Anyway, back to topic:

For video I'd use Media Player Classic Homecinema edition with Shark007's codec pack.

For audio I'd recommend Songbird - has loads of features and seems pretty stable. Much faster and less bloated than Winamp. Plays all music I have chucked at it so far and is pretty good on the internet radio front too.

If you like the minimalist route (no bells, whistles, gongs or other crap) and have all your files in a compatible format then I'd say go for Billy - super fast, perfectly stable (in my experience) - just load up the directory with all your music (takes about 1sec for 6000 files) select shuffle and play! This is by far my favourite music player it just dosen't have support for all my music file formats and has no DRM capability so all my Napster tracks won't play

I noticed nothing about photoshop-esq programs -- this little article might be helpful

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:11

Thanks for the audio recommendations. Out of interest, what problems did you have with open office?

I tried calc for the first time and thought it was pretty good. I have a large spreadsheet that I use for indexing collections and calc converted it to ODF without any trouble. It also now has the benefit of having more than 256 columns which Excel was forcing me to spread data over multiple tabs.

There was a slight annoyance with autocomplete but I googled it and was able to turn off the "feature". Overall I'm quite impressed actually.

Radiation · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:15

What's a good firewall to use?

I like to be able to control what can connect to the internet and view what's going on, been using an old version of kerio for years but think it might be a good idea to try something else.

Craig321 · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:24

Radiation said:
What's a good firewall to use?

I like to be able to control what can connect to the internet and view what's going on, been using an old version of kerio for years but think it might be a good idea to try something else.

Comodo Firewall with Defense+ unchecked.

The Comodo package comes with an anti-virus these days, just uncheck that during the installation and install something like Avast

Ricki · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:24

If I was stacking MS Office XP or 97 against OpenOffice I would likely go with OpenOffice. But as a student I was able to get the MS Office 2007 Ultiamte Edition for £39.95, and issues such as the 256 columns have been adressed and sorted in that version. But I'd agree Calc isn't too far behind Excel.

My main gripes are MS Word vs. OO Writer. I have to write a lot of reports and as it is an engineering degree I have tables, figures, equations and all sorts littered throughout the documents. All have to be correctly labled, numbered and referenced. I use captions, smart auto-text and the cross-referncing feature a lot. Now, Word is far from perfect in this respect but I found it far easier and quicker to do this in Word than Writer - I may just have been missing something obvious. But the same goes with tables - I just can't get on with the way OO deals with them and it seems a little unstable on these too.

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:29

Haven't tried writer yet but i think I'll only be using it for basic things. The other thing I'm not sure of for calc is macros. I use a lot of vba for work and for automating repetitive tasks and I don't really want to have to learn everything all over again for a different scripting language.

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:30

Also, do you think its necessary to run comodo as i'm behind a router with nat and have windows firewall enabled (xp)?

Craig321 · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:32

herr_brush said:
Also, do you think its necessary to run comodo as i'm behind a router with nat and have windows firewall enabled (xp)?

Not at all necessary, no. It's just Comodo is a lot easier to use if you want control over what's going in/out of your PC.

herr_brush · 8 Mar 2009 at 13:35

Yeah I figured it would be ok without. The less stuff I have running the better and I'm pretty careful with browsing (firefox and NoScript).

MarcLister · 8 Mar 2009 at 14:42

Ricki said:
I noticed nothing about photoshop-esq programs -- this little article might be helpful

I'd say Paint.NET or The Gimp.

herr_brush said:
It also now has the benefit of having more than 256 columns which Excel was forcing me to spread data over multiple tabs.

As has been said, is sorted in Office/Excel 2007.

herr_brush said:
There was a slight annoyance with autocomplete but I googled it and was able to turn off the "feature". Overall I'm quite impressed actually.

Yeah. Mum uses OO on her laptop since my brother managed to lose our Office 2000 CDs. The Autocomplete got on her nerves so I had to turn it off for her.