Must-Have Programs for Your Fresh Windows Installation

It happens to everyone: your computer slows down or crashes. When it comes time to reformat, having a list of programs to put back on can be indispensable. Here’s my recommendations and why they are possibly the best.

1. Ninite

Ninite is a program that lets you pick a group of common programs to install. It’s not necessary, but makes the process a lot faster. Most programs that I’m about to list can be mass-installed by it. I will not cover all of the software it makes available, but I’d encourage you to look them up. There’s some real gems in there.

2. Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome

Internex Explorer is a slow, open door for viruses to waltz into your computer through. Firefox and Chrome are fast, secure, and customisable. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, they are both 900% improvements over IE. Opera and Safari aren’t bad either, but they aren’t as customisable.

3.  Pidgin Instant Messenger

Ever heard of Trillian? Pidgin is an open-source instant messenger that lets you log in to all your IM services at once. This is great because running separate programs for AIM, Yahoo and the like can be very resource consuming and visually cluttered. Pidgin solves that.

4. Mozilla Thunderbird

If you’re not using Gmail or are hell-bent on using Outlook, Thunderbird is the way to go for e-mail. It has extensions for calendaring too, but I would recommend Google Calendar for that.

5. CCCP

The Combined Community Codec Pack, or CCCP, is a collection of media codecs that will allow any media player to play any file. DVDs and most media from Bittorrent will need this or something like it to work properly.

6. Foxit Reader

Adobe Reader isn’t the only program that reads PDFs. Foxit is a faster, lighter PDF reader with most of the same features. I love it and think it’s worth a go for anyone who is tired of Adobe’s bloat.

7. OpenOffice

If you are a fan of Microsoft Office 2003 rather than 2007′s interface, OpenOffice has a very similar layout and feature set all for free. I use it exclusively and think the small learning curve is totally worth it.

8. Microsoft Security Essentials

If you use Norton, McAfee, PC-Cillin, or Panda, get your money back ASAP. They are fat, slow, expensive, and the first thing that a hacker or virus writer will break through when they write a new virus. Microsoft Security Essentials is free, lightweight, does a great job, and is not yet popular enough to attract the attention of the virus writers. AVG and Avast are good too, but I prefer MSE overall.

9. Windows Defender

Microsoft Security Essentials is great for viruses, but needs to be supplemented with an anti-spyware program. Windows Defender does a great job of that. For a little extra oomph, Spybot does a great job and cleaning and immunization, although it won’t run automatically.

10. CCleaner

Every computer will accumulate clutter. CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) finds and gets rid of most of the clutter and will fix many registry issues too. It is the first step to getting your computer to run faster. I would not recommend other registry or cleaning software. As an added bonus, Cleaner is also the best program for managing your start-up items.

11. Defraggler

If you don’t defragment your computer, it will get slower and slower until it chokes on itself. The built-in defragmenter in Windows is garbage. Defraggler is free, fast and does a great job on your computer. I would wait until all your programs are installed and closed before you run CCleaner. Also, it helps to reboot the computer when it’s done. You will notice great speed improvements from even the freshest computers by doing this.

12. 7-zip

WinZip and Winrar are old-hat. 7-zip is faster, more versatile and totally free (no nags either). A must-have for any computer.

13. Java, Flash, Silverlight, .NET

There are many programs and web services that depend on various background frameworks. The major ones are Java, Flash, Silverlight and .NET. Install these and you’ve got most of your bases covered. They can be tedious and time consuming to install alone, so I recommend installing them with Ninite.

14. The latest service pack

Your computer’s speed, stability and security all depend on the latest updates. The most important updates of all are the service packs. As of the time of this writing, XP users need Service Pack 3, Vista users need Service Pack 2, and Windows 7 users do not need to worry about it at the time of this writing.

These are just the essentials though. I would highly recommend that you look at the other things offered by Ninite, especially Paint.net, VLC, Songbird, Dropbox, uTorrent, and Evernote. I use these programs extensively and believe them to be the best in their class.

If you think I’ve missed something, please let me know in the comments and I’ll see about adding it.