Bjossi on 12/6/2009 at 15:43
Quote Posted by vurt
Anti-virus, firewalls etc i dont use, except for what's built into Vista (Defender and the default Firewall). Defender is usually turned off though. NOT recommened for Noobs / those who surf on pr0n sites or generally have no idea what they're doing :P
Hey, safe porn browsing is possible, without the need to put up many layers of AVs and firewalls, you just need to know the good free sites. :p
demagogue on 12/6/2009 at 17:16
Thanks for that public service announcement.
june gloom on 13/6/2009 at 00:26
As someone who went years without a proper AV (Norton does not qualify as a "proper" AV) or proper spyware protection I can assure you that there is no such thing as "safe porn browsing".
DarkForge on 13/6/2009 at 08:40
A lot of the software I use is probably way outdated by now - installed them years ago and have stuck with them ever since. Never really bothered trying out anything else unless I've absolutely had to.
Main media player: Windows Media Player.
Other media players: Realplayer, Quicktime, DivX Player, Applian FLV Player.
Audio editor: Audacity.
Video editors: Windows Movie Maker, Avidemux (originally tried VirtualDub but I just couldn't get the damn thing to play ball!)
Conversion tools: dbPowerAmp (audio), Pazera (FLV to AVI), avi2wav... and probably one or two other various video encoders that I only used once for a specific task.
Music CD ripping/burning: Musicmatch.
Data CD/DVD burning: Pinnacle (did use an old Nero until I changed DVD drives and it was no longer compatible).
Video DVD burning: TMPGEnc DVD Author 3.
Downloading: uTorrent, Orbit Downloader, eMule. (Previous conquests include iMesh, Ares, Kazaa and WinMX).
Misc: Microsoft Office 2000, WinRAR, Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, yEnc32, RapidCRC, Sysreset (mIRC), Steam (and that's only coz HL2 needs it). And probably numerous other boring things.
Quote Posted by steo
Unlocker Assistant Came with my Windows build. Supposedly solves problems with being unable to access files because they've been locked by another process but even when it would be useful, it hardly seems to work.
steo, I used to have the problem of processes locking up files too, so I also got an Unlocker Assistant. I don't know if it's the same one you've got (mine didn't come with Windows, I downloaded it separately) but unlike you I've never had a problem with it - it's worked for me every time so far. I believe mine was from (
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker) if you want to check it out.
Paulie007 on 13/6/2009 at 08:59
Clonezilla - I plodded along with Ghost and its various issues for years until I discovered Clonezilla. It is an excellect app for creating and restoring system images.
Gpart - partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.
Google Documents - It's lightweight and perfect for me as I rarely need to use any complex formatting features.
Bootcamp - Comes as part of Mac OSX and allows you to run windows on intel based Macs.
Google Chrome - so far so good. Although I wasn't able to download any file exceeding 2GB. Dunno if this is still an issue.
I use a lot of open source software most of which has already been mentioned. Great idea for a thread. I found some really useful stuff here.
On the subject of Anti-virus software; Unless you're running OSX or Linux I'd strongly recommend using it. The problem is that the real-time protection (all files are scanned while in memory) tends to degrade the performance of your pc and can also interfere with other programs especially games. If you insist on not using it I would recommend using a strict firewall config and running regular spyware and online virus scans.
The Brain on 13/6/2009 at 10:34
Quote Posted by Matthew
What would be a decent choice for video conversion software, can I ask?
I use VirtualDub and (
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/) MediaCoder for that.
steo on 13/6/2009 at 10:35
Surely the best anti virus scenario is to get some decent and not annoying anti-virus but kill the processes whenever you want to do any high-end gaming.
Darkforge, that is the same unlocker as I've got and I think it's worked every time I've used it on my home pc, but there have been very few times when I've had to. I installed it on my work computer though, because I was getting issues with locked files and it didn't seem to be able to do much. It would tell me that the file was locked but wasn't able to unlock it, which kind of defeats the purpose. Could well be specific to the setup I've got at work though.
Just installed launchy, it seems to find stuff that I have shortcuts to on the desktop/start bar, but getting it to find my games in the games folder is proving a little troublesome. I added the folder to the catalogue, but it keeps turning up directories and files that I don't want. It also seems to be getting slow now that the catalogue has nearly 300000 items in it, and crashes a lot when editing the settings. Any advice on how to set it up so it finds the stuff I want and not the stuff I don't, and is quick about it? My current plan is to create a folder with shortcuts to all my games in it, and then have launchy catalogue that but not the games directory itself.
Matthew on 13/6/2009 at 22:10
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
For the simplest re-encoding, you generally need to do this:
* From the Audio menu, either leave "Direct Stream Copy" enabled to copy the audio track directly, or set it to "Full Processing Mode" to compress it (the Compression option then becomes available and you can choose MP3 for example.)
* From the Video menu, choose "Compression" to choose the codec to use (or press Ctrl+P)
* Go to File->Save AVI (or press F7).
I'll keep it in mind, thanks.
Ah, now that MediaCoder may be exactly what I'm looking for! All I need is for various-to-iPod conversions.
Nameless Voice on 13/6/2009 at 22:14
Going way off-topic here, but if you want to resize videos in VirtualDub, that's under Video->Filters.
Queue on 18/6/2009 at 00:08
I had my first real taste of using Windows Vista today.
...what a piece of shit. Or do I need permission from fucking Microsoft to say that? Nothing, and I mean nothing, was easier or better--or well thought out--than in any of the previous incarnations of Windows (and for my money, Windows 98 is still tits and beer over the lot). I had a headache, was hearing voices, and wanted to perform vile sexual acts with llamas after about fifteen minutes (a process that usually takes at least a half-an-hour).
