Filed under: Features, Windows, Commercial, Freeware, Analysis
5 Apps You Run That Suck, and 5 Replacements That Don't
by Lee Mathews Aug 5th 2008 at 1:00PM
If you frequent our site (and you do, because you're cool), you've probably read this article about the 5 most annoying apps on your PC. Well, it's time for another installment - this time with alternatives that offer the functionality you want without the annoying, fetid bloat that you don't. Note: before the gripes start, to compare apples to apples I'm only offering apps that need to be installed - no portable apps, no web apps. Ahead Nero
There was a time when Nero wasn't an overblown pig of a recording application, but over the years it's been "improved" to the glorious state of excess you see it in today. What sucks about Nero today? Well, let's see. First, it tries to install the Ask toolbar during setup. Then there's the hundreds of megs of DVD templates it piles on (none of them particularly attractive). Last but not least, there's Nero Scout. Has anyone ever found this useful? I don't know about you, but click and drag or browsing for files has always worked just fine for me.
The Alternative: CD Burner XP
I want burning software to burn discs, not transcode video, play media, serve it over my home lan, print labels, and scour my drives constantly for files I may want to burn. Not only is CD Burner XP free, it's also miniscule when compared to Nero, installs in seconds, not minutes, and doesn't bring any excess crap along with it. Launch it, and you're given clear choices: data, music, iso, copy, erase. The dual pane view makes creating compilations drag-and-drop easy, as does the totally slick dropbox.
Adobe Reader
The PDF is a great idea: a platform independent document that's immune to the usual formatting issues. Again, ages ago Acrobat Reader was a fine choice. Things were obviously spiraling out of control when Adobe introduced the Speed Launch in attempt to help this slug of an app launch slightly faster. Soon the installer started trying to cram a toolbar down your throat (I see a pattern here....) and things just keep getting worse.
The Alternative: Foxit PDF Reader
I'd wager that you can open and close Foxit about half a dozen times before Reader finishes launching once. It's 92% smaller and still manages to render PDFs very accurately. What more can you say? A PDF reader should, well, read PDFs. It doesn't need to do any other fancy crap.
WinZip
Believe it or not, there are still a ton of people using WinZip. During the install, I noticed winzip112.msi extracting, so I decided to investigate. I mean, why not just let users download only the 6.5mb .msi? Well, because they're trying to sneak Uniblue Registry Booster and the Google Desktop and Toolbar past you. Nice. Winzip's main window consumes 11mb of memory whilst doing nothing. doesn't support .7z archives, and costs $29.95 to register after a 45-day trial. Oh wait - you can get the full version free if you complete a TrialPay offer. Gee, thanks!
The Alternative: 7-Zip
While it stands to reason that 7-Zip supports .7z files (hell, it'll even unpack DEB and RPM packages), there are plenty of reasons to dump WinZip for it. The .msi is 1.1mb, it consumes less than 20% the drive space of WinZip after installation, and it's totally free. It even does a slightly better job at re-packing the WinZip installer files than WinZip does.
BitCometWhy anyone would ever want to install this piece of trash torrent manager is totally beyond me, yet 65 million Cnet users (I hear your snickering) have done just that. It's a 6mb download, doubles in size after install, eats 26mb of memory when running even when it's idle, tries to change your homepage, and it pops up more alerts windows than most antivirus apps. The interface as more cluttered with junk than Fred Sanford's back yard. BitComet is so evil, Satan actually forces people in Hell to use it.
The Alternative: uTorrent
If you're already using it, thank you for raising the average level of torrent user intelligence. If you're not, here's why you should be: it's a 214kb download (about 4% the size of BitComet), expands to about 300kb when installed with the webUI, and uses only 6mb of memory when idle. uTorrent will download just as fast as BitComet (if not faster, in my experience), it's interface is neat and clean, and the webUI lets you control your torrents from anywhere.
iTunes
I can hear the Apple fanbois cringe, but here we go! I'm not sure how many of you wanted a horrible video player like Quicktime, a ho-hum browser like Safari, and a..er...life synching(?) tool like MobileMe to come packaged with your media manager, but I didn't. I wanted a program that would take my songs, pics, and whatnot and dump them
on to my player. iTunes is a behemoth, and the fact that Apple has no qualms about cramming any half-baked app they dream up into its installer irritates me to no end.The Alternative: EphPod
EphPod is 3.6mb and it's just EphPod. You won't have to dodge any unwanted installers, and it can handle pretty much any iPod chore: syncing, firmware updates, calendar, contact, news, and weather updates. EphPod is easy on resources and boasts a clean, straightforward interface. You don't have to worry about setting the manual updates option. No, it doesn't handle video files, but I don't care, because I don't want to watch a movie on a screen the size of a Ritz cracker.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Superevil said 1:44PM on 8-05-2008
Awesome list. I havent used BitComet in about 2 years and I'm not surprised that it sucks now. The one gripe I have is about your iTunes suggestion. Is there an iTunes style clone that doesn't suck other than Songbird? I've just started using J River Media Jukebox and while it's not that bad it's not great either. I just want a simple clone somewhere along the lines of Banshee on linux.
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HighLife said 1:42PM on 8-05-2008
Try Foobar2000.
Superevil said 6:00PM on 8-05-2008
I have years ago, it sucks. I'm talking one that LOOKS like iTunes
Brian Mazz said 2:03PM on 8-06-2008
have you tried out mediamonkey?
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
Scott said 1:39PM on 8-05-2008
Who cares about the drive space it takes up? Shouldn't be part of the review. Memory usage, cpu usage? Definitely. Drive space used? Seriously?
Reply
Lee Mathews said 1:45PM on 8-05-2008
My MSI Wind has an 80gb drive, so yeah, drive space matters.
Seth R said 7:50AM on 8-11-2008
you have 80 gigs and you're complaining about a 20 meg difference? honestly how much porn can one man need.
Kendawg said 8:17AM on 8-23-2008
What are you on about? How can drive space not be part of the review?
Not all of us have the money to buy 2 TB HDDs.
emmzee said 1:47PM on 8-05-2008
Does 7-Zip still have the same terrible UI that it did a year or so back (the last time I tried it)? I still use an unregistered version of WinRAR for my zipping/unzipping ...
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Lee Mathews said 1:48PM on 8-05-2008
I prefer to call it "utilitarian." It does the job, but you're right, it's not going to win any beauty contests.
Andrew Pollack said 2:47PM on 8-05-2008
z-ZIP has a UI that I don't care for, however jZIP
http://www.jzip.com/
Uses z-ZIP as its base, but provides an interface that is on par with what people are used to with WinZIP. Also free, and using it you're essentially using z-zip.
Matias Korhonen said 2:50PM on 8-05-2008
As far as I'm concerned, I've always like the 7-zip UI. I don't need icons that try and make my happy. If I wanted to be happy I wouldn't spend quite so much time in front of my computer.
Haplo said 3:04PM on 8-05-2008
User interface? Right clic add to zip, right clic extract here. Who needs user interfaces with a zipping program?
geri said 8:25AM on 8-06-2008
I agree - JZIP is my favourite
Simon Nikolao said 3:47PM on 8-06-2008
I second 7zip as having a poor user interface. It was so bad that I jumped ship for winrar, and I hate crappy proprietary compression and archiving software.
ReZ said 10:56AM on 8-07-2008
ever heard of shell commands? you dont even need to OPEN 7zip, thats how good it is. you just right click on something that youd like to extract and all your options are in the windows shell. so too when you compress.
James said 1:48PM on 8-05-2008
@2: I think the idea is not that you need that precious 6 MB of your hard drive back, but rather that program-size bloat corresponds neatly to program-feature bloat. WTF are they doing with a torrent client that takes 12MB of stuff?
Granted, I was going to suggest Azureus/Vuze as a BT manager, which I'm sure is a bit bloaty (and getting moreso with each release). But I actually use some of its full-featured-ness (like the RSSFeed plugin), so uTorrent is a bit *too* lightweight for my needs.
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hadyouken said 2:19PM on 8-05-2008
utorrent has ALWAYS has the ability to get torrents from RSS feeds... no plugin needed, it's just there. uTorrent has a ton of features without being bloated (my personal favorite being the ip filter)
Undrhil said 7:35AM on 8-06-2008
Try www.torrent2exe.com (it's a website.) You download the .torrent file, tell the website where to find the file (or link to the .torrent somewhere on the web), select whether you want the created .exe file to have everything or download stuff to work and then tell it where to put it.
Once it's on your computer, you run the file and let it do its thing. It'll even ask how you want to seed when the download finishes (either a specific amount of bytes or a timelimit in hours.) It's similar to the plain-jane BitTorrent client, which opens a new window per .torrent and all that stuff too.
Alex M said 1:52PM on 8-05-2008
Awesome post!
As far as I can tell 7-zip _has_ indeed improved their UI. Also, TUGZip and IZArc are other fantastic alternatives.
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