That Stupid Club

Came across an arti­cle about how the newer ver­sions of soft­ware may not be bet­ter than pre­vi­ous ver­sions, most of it caused by increas­ing fea­ture sets and thus bloat. I am pretty par­tic­u­lar about what goes on my PC as I need all the CPU power and RAM I can get for my weighty devel­op­ment tools. Rather than stick­ing to the “last good ver­sion”, I try to look for alter­na­tives based on the fol­low­ing criteria:

• Free is good, open source is better.
• Small foot­print, but not at the expense of usability.

Instant Mes­sag­ing Programs

Miranda IM is the best IM client on Win­dows. It is very light weight (the new ver­sion 0.7 fea­tures a new mem­ory man­age­ment model which makes it more mem­ory effi­cient com­pared to the pre­vi­ous ver­sions) and is very exten­si­ble, as it sup­ports plu­g­ins. It does take some effort to set up so it works exactly the way you want it to, but I do not see that as a bad thing.

Media Play­ers

I use two dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions for audio and video. QMP by Quin­nware is my audio player of choice. It is cur­rently in beta, but accord­ing to the cre­ator Paul Quinn, it is very close to release now. The mem­ory usage might be a lit­tle on the high side (com­pared to svelte play­ers like foobar2000 and XMPlay but in my opin­ion its usabil­ity trumps that.

I use Media Player Clas­sic for video play­back. It looks like the old Win­dows Media Player 6.4 but that’s the point. I do not need my video player to have some incred­i­bly slick inter­face. Just make it sim­ple and sen­si­ble, and then stay the hell out of the way when a video is play­ing. I usu­ally install the Com­bined Com­mu­nity Codec Pack (still the best codec pack) which fea­tures MPC as out of the instal­la­tion options.

Image and Video Software

No idea about video edit­ing soft­ware unfor­tu­nately, not one of my inter­ests. For image edit­ing, Paint.NET is the tool for quick and sim­ple jobs. I find it to be very light weight and very functional.

For image view­ing and man­age­ment, XnView seems the best I have tried. Very quick, and the inter­face is a clone of early ACD­See. Only minus is that it has no Uni­code sup­port, but I can live with that… usually.

I also have CDis­playEx installed. It is an open source clone of CDis­play which is sadly very out­dated. These are really niche appli­ca­tions for view­ing scanned comics, but are capa­ble and very fast image viewers.

And Two More Pre­vi­ous Favorites

For PDF view­ers, Foxit Reader is very, very fast. There’s a bit of fea­ture creep in the lat­est ver­sion 2.2, but its still fast. No way am I going back to Adobe Reader with­out some major re-architecturing efforts on Adobe’s end.

As for email, I have used Mozilla Thun­der­bird for years now. It is not light weight by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion but I can­not do with­out the exten­sions nowa­days. Light­ning needs to mature before I can con­sider rec­om­mend­ing it for most of my clients though.

Stuff Missed Out

The PC World edi­tors missed one appli­ca­tion, the Nero suite. Ver­sions 7 and 8 clock in at a ridicu­lously mas­sive 170+ megs. I just want to burn some CDs and some DVDs… There are free alter­na­tives: InfraRecorder (open source) and CDBurn­erXP (free as in beer). Both of these are very easy to use and will be more than ade­quate for nor­mal burn­ing tasks.