Essentials for Audio PC's
The following is a list of essential programs and utilities
for optimising your PC further and ensuring stability along with links to
the relevant Web Pages so that you can download them quickly and easily:
TweakUI (By Microsoft)
and ItweakU (By Jockesoft)
are two very similar tweaking utilities, both are free to download but offer
extended functionality to registered users who pay a small fee:
NT
TweakUI (http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/downloads/PowerToys/Networking/NTTweakUI.asp)
ITweakU
(http://www.jockesoft.com/itweaku.shtml)
For fully customisable Windows installs and the fantastic IEradicator (Which completely removes Internet Explorer from an existing Windows install along with all dependencies on it - Highly recommended) have a look at the 98 Lite site. Windows 98 and ME are supported Windows 2000 Lite is coming:
Windows Lite
(http://www.98lite.net/download.html)
Compression
agents are essential to almost all PC users. The most popular are WinRar,
WinZip and WinAce. Winzip is not really necessary since WinRar
and WinAce can handle Zip archives and do the job better than WinZip:
WinRar
(http://www.rarsoft.com/download.htm)
Winace (http://www.winace.com)
WinZip
(http://www.winzip.com/download.htm)
Opera is by far and away the best internet browser. It's much faster and much more stable than IE or Netscape plus it has a built in e-mail client and is far tidier than IE. It's also free:
Opera (http://www.opera.com/download/)
Adobe Acrobat Reader
is useful for reading help files and documentation supplied with programs
which is often in Acrobat PDF format:
Adobe
Acrobat Reader
(http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html)
Microsoft have
homepages for each of their versions of Windows which are host to information,
updates and other Windows related downloads:
Win 2000
homepage (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000)
Win ME homepage
(http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsMe)
Win 98 homepage
(http://www.microsoft.com/Windows98)
Win 95 homepage
(http://www.microsoft.com/Windows95)
The Driverguide is a useful site for finding drivers for all sorts
of hardware:
Driverguide
(http://www.driverguide.com)
ZDNet has now merged
with softseek to offer downloads galore. there are huge amounts
of freeware/shareware and demos available:
ZDNet
(http://www.zdnet.com/downloads)
Quicktime
(By Apple), Shockwave
and Flash (By Macromedia),
RealPlayer (By RealNetworks)
and Windows MediaPlayer (By Microsoft)
are web-based multimedia programs which handle various media types:
Quicktime
Player (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download)
Shockwave
Player (http://www.macromedia.com/go/getshockwaveplayer/)
Flash Player (http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer/)
Real
Player 8 Basic
(http://www.real.com/player/index.html)
Windows Mediaplayer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia)