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What programs do you load after a clean Windows install? - Ask DLS

Windowsby Brad Linder Nov 16th 2007

Fresh Vista install
Here at Download Squad HQ, we install and uninstall a lot of applications, tweak a lot of settings, and do a whole bunch of other things that generally makes Windows unhappy with us.

When I brought home my shiny new laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium earlier this year, I didn't know how lucky I was. My new PC shut down when I asked it to, slept when I closed the lid, and didn't cause glitches every time I started playing audio.

After spending some time pulling my hair out trying to get to the bottom of things, I figured the easiest way to solve some of my problems would be just to do a clean install of Windows. While programs like CCleaner are great for dusting the cobwebs of your windows registry, nothing works as well as reformatting the hard drive.

Of course, this was also an excellent opportunity to make sure I have a good backup of all my important data files, and to download and install just the applications that are most important to me in daily life. So after the jump is a list of the applications I started loading on my PC after restoring Windows. We'd love to know what programs you can't live without and what are the first things you load on a new PC?


Security applications
 Internet applications

Graphics and video applications
Office applications

Audio applications
  • Audacity (audio editor)
  • Cool Edit 2000 (yeah, I know, old school, but I've had a licensed copy lying around for years)
  • Reaper (audio editor)
  • Winamp (no, really)
  • Juice (podcast aggregator)
  • WinLAME (audio compression utility)
  • Levelator (excellent tool for making your audio recordings sound good)
Utilities
  • Sandboxie (lets you install applications in an isolated environment)
  • 7-Zip (compression utility)
  • Absolute Uninstaller (alternative to Windows uninstaller
  • doPDF (install a virtual printer that lets you print any document as a PDF)
So what's on your PC?

Tags: applications, clean-install, fresh-install, system-restore, windows-vista

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Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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