Essential/good software for a new laptop

DelBoy Trotter

I see there is an sticky post for essential software, but it is long out of date!
I have recently got a new laptop. I've mainly been using my work laptop for personal stuff for the last couple of years, but now that I've got my new laptop, what would you suggest as essential software? Is the built in Windows antivirus decent? Or are there better alternatives?

Dravokivich

I use Bitdefender.

But to be honest, "essential" software depends on what you are looking to do. You shouldn't treat those types of things as a checklist of stuff to put onto your device. What do you want to do? people can make suggestions based on that.

DelBoy Trotter

Dravokivich wrote: »

I use Bitdefender.

Do you find Bitdefender better than Windows built in security?

Dravokivich wrote: »

But to be honest, "essential" software depends on what you are looking to do. You shouldn't treat those types of things as a checklist of stuff to put onto your device. What do you want to do? people can make suggestions based on that.

Yeah that is a fair point, and I wasn't really treating the list as essential software. I was more wondering about the security side of things. My usual use for the laptop will be internet browsing, Netflix, streaming sport, a bit of Excel/Word (which I need to get), and the very, very, very odd bit of Torrenting

LoveBiscuits

As mentioned above it depends on what you use it for but common apps for me include :
notepad++ for a basic text editor.
Open office for document reading / writing
qBitTorrent as a torrent client
Firefox as a browser of choice (+ extensions uBlock origin or adBlock plus)
7zip to manage zip files
VLC as a media player
Plex as a media server
MS Security essentials do me fine as an antiVirus.


That’s all that jump to mind really. Most daily things now I’d use a browser version of.
I.e Netflix/ Spotify for media, gDrive as a file backup ,

Dravokivich

And here's where you're going to get a difference of opinion. I'm not keen on PLex, I use EMBY :P I stopped using firefox a long time ago, and I use Deluge for torrents. I thought Open Office went?

Regarding Bitdefender, they say they are better than the rest. They've a good suite of Antivirus and Malware protection at a reasonable price. They also have a VPN service partnership with Hotspot Shield.

FishOnABike

LibreOffice is a successor / fork of OpenOffice and is more actively maintained. I'd use LibreOffice rather than MS Office or OpenOffice.

Robert ninja

First thing I install on any windows machine is a package manager. I use https://chocolatey.org/ there's others but I haven't tried them. It's the only way I can install and manage most things from the same place.

choco upgrade all -y

Is the most useful command as it will update everything you've installed with chocolatey which for me is everything I possibly can. Use https://chocolatey.org/packages to see if the software you want is available.

However the best software on a windows machine is something already installed: msconfig.exe! Use it to turn of all the many startup processes that every application decided for itself it needs to begin upon boot. That's the first thing I run.

When it's time to do a malicious software scan I use something like trend micro's house call (haven't used it in years so can't say what it's like now) temporarily just for that scan and then remove it. Most users do not require the resource-heavy 24/7 anti virus suites.

And as other person said LibreOffice is superior but you're also possibly better off using cloud productivity software depending on your use case which can just be used in a browser. I've gone full for my group projects where we have to all contribute to a document because copying and emailing it around became such a bother.

If you want an exhaustive list I'd check out https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/List_of_recommended_Windows_software if you're ok withmemey type of articles