THE LIST

RPGC Assistance Forums Technical Support Forum
1

The goal of this thread is to make a tiny database of all the useful stuff on the net. Useful and LEGAL, at least. This does not include torrent sites. Please give suggestions either in this thread or PMs to me or whatever. Add a tiny description. If the program is at all useful I’ll add it to this first post (this apparently fell through due to me being a lazy bitch, skim thread). If you’re posting shit I will edit your post and call you funny names.

TEH LISTZ0RZ

General purpose, like browsers and pornography and stuff

<a href=“http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/”>Firefox</a>, a great browser which will seriously cut down on the crap intake.
<a href=“http://www.opera.com/”>Opera</a>, another good browser, though I don’t use it myself.
<a href=“http://mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/”>Thunderbird</a>, a great email client. The jailbait sister of Firefox.

<a href=“http://www.powerarchiver.com/”>Powerarchiver</a>, winrar on crack.

<a href=“http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php”>FoxIt PDF Reader</a>, a great PDF reader, without all that bloated crap Adobe has.

<a href=“http://www.daemon-tools.cc”>Daemon Tools</a>, a nice, free virtual drive.

<a href=“http://dosbox.sourceforge.net”>DOSBox</a>, a DOS Emulator, great to get old programs and games running.

<a href=“http://www.goldenhawk.com/”>CDRWIN</a>, free burning utility, in case you have neither Nero nor Alcohol.

Anti-virus, spyware and general internet shit

<a href=“http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10399602.html?tag=lst-0-2”>Ad-Aware</a>, Spyware scanner.
<a href=“http://www.download.com/Spybot-Search-Destroy/3000-8022_4-10401314.html?tag=lst-0-1”>Spybot</a>, Spyware scanner.
<a href=“http://download.com.com/3000-2094-881470.html?tag=lst-0-2”>RegClean</a>, cleans out your registry of dead keys and other general stuff. Not too great, but it works.
<a href=“http://www.merijn.org”>HijackThis</a>, honestly, I don’t know what this is, as I’ve never had a need to use it. Some people swear by what it does, though, whatever that is.

<a href=“http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php”>AVG AntiVirus Free Edition</a>, a free virus scanner. It’s decent if you’re broke.
<a href=“http://www.free-av.com/”>AntiVir</a>, another free virus scanner.

Codecs, media players and other multimedia thingamajigs

<a href=“http://hellninjacommando.com/defilerpak”>The Defilerpak</a>, every codec you’ll ever need minus quicktime and realmedia. This is awesome.
<a href=“http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/mirror.htm”>Quick Alternative and Real Alternative</a>, these take care of the rest. Don’t install the original players, they’re like cancer. In the balls. On the internet.

<a href=“http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358”>Media Player Classic</a>, an amazingly nice and small Media Player (obviously). I use this for all my video needs.
<a href=“http://www.irfanview.com”>IrfanView</a>, another media player/editor/THING… I don’t use it.
<a href=“http://download.com.com/3000-2139-10199517.html?tag=lst-0-2”>Winamp 2.91</a>, my precious audio player. <a href=“http://www.winamp.com”>Winamp 5</a> has got nothing on this baby! Nothing!

<a href=“http://www.goldwave.com/”>Goldwave</a>, a nice sound editing program. Apparently. I wouldn’t know, I was born deaf.

Filesharing

<a href=“http://www.bittornado.com”>BitTornado</a>, a nice BT client, though it has an annoying memory leak on the windows versions.
<a href=“http://www.utorrent.com/”>uTorrent</a>, another nice BT client. It’s actually lighter than BitTornado, and with more options. Just switched to it myself.
<a href=“http://pingpong-abc.sourceforge.net/”>ABC</a>, a BT client based on BitTornado. Many people use it, I don’t, seems decent.

<a href=“http://www.emule-project.net”>eMule</a>, filesharing client. Fairly popular.
<a href=“http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/”>DC++</a>, a hub-based filesharing client. Has a ton of stuff.

<a href=“http://www.winmx.com”>WinMX</a>, for you jackasses that drive the RIAA coffee boy into giving handjobs for cash by pirating music. Shame on you.

2

<a href=“http://www.mirc.com”>mIRC</a>

The best IRC client in the world, because it doesn’t make you learn perl and you can’t write shell scripts because what the fuck kind of nerd would want to write a shell script in perl for a program he uses to talk to other idiots on the internet?

3

Adobe Photoshop
No matter how good you think GIMP or Paint Shop Pro is, this can do that and more besides. The greatest image-editing tool currently in existence.

Animation Shop 3
This, however, is probably the best animated gif-making and -editing software in existence.

Open Office
A free alternative to Microsoft Office. The debate rages a to whether it’s actually better or not, but I don’t care. At all.

NVU
Open-source web-editing software that doesn’t write code you could overflow the Grand Canyon with.

FTP Explorer
Incredibly basic FTP software. Doesn’t have nearly the amount of options that WS_FTP does, but is incredibly simple and easy to use.

Azureus
BitTorrent software. Allows multiple downloads, super-seeding, downloading of selective files from a torrent, banning leechers etc etc. Not as simple as BitTornado though.

FreeRIP
Rips audio tracks to Mp3, Wav and Midi. Simple to use and free.

4

<a href = “http://www.google.com”>Google.com</a>

When you don’t have something, instead of asking right away, use google, you lazy cigs!!!

Other not-as-good directories/search engines:

http://www.metacrawler.com (search engine)

http://www.yahoo.com (directory)

http://www.askjeeves.com (search engine)

http://www.altavista.com (search engine)

5

It seems you forgot of a little program called Paint, Pierson.

6

Not to mention that the trial versions of Photoshop SUCK, and The GIMP can do better than it. If you have a few hundred dollars to spend, by all means. Otherwise, get The GIMP

7

I don’t know what you downloaded but the version I got was the real thing, just with a thrity-day timeout. And we all know how to get around that.

8

Yeah, let’s try and mostly stick with freeware and good trials.

9

WS_FTP Pro has a 30 day trial but i’m just using the ftp that comes with Mozilla

10

Instant Messaging:
X-Chat
Gaim

Image-Editing:
The Gimp

Anything else:
SourceForge
Mac OS X Download Centre

11

Trillian

Great chatting service. It puts together all the other big-name chatting services, into this nice little package.

12

If you’re using Hijack This, and don’t know what you’re doing, you can seriously screw up your computer, so click “save log” in hijackthis, and then copy the log into the search box at <A HREF=“http://www.hijackthis.de/en” TARGET="_TOP">http://www.hijackthis.de/en</A>. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot easier than wading through crap. Use your own judgment, though, cause it could tell you to disable a file you need. That’d be dumb.

[edit] Also, the real homepage for Hijack This is <A HREF=“http://www.merijn.org” TARGET="_TOP">http://www.merijn.org/</A>. He’s got a lot of other great utilities on their too, like Kill2Me and KazaaBeGone. He also made CWShredder, which has since been bought by <A HREF=“http://www.intermute.com/” TARGET="_TOP">Intermute</A>, and integrated into SpySubtract. Fortunately, Intermute still allows you to download a seperate, non-integrated version of CWShredder.

[edit 07-2005] Since I made that post, Intermute was bought by Trend Micro, so now the free version of CWShredder can be found at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ and is now integrated into Trend Micro Anti-Spyware, instead of SpySubtract. You should probably go ahead and use Housecall for any of your virus cleaning needs, too. It’s not the only solution, but it helps.

13

Do NOT get Trillian. Resource Hog, Spywares ahoy, and overall it just sucks! Gaim is pretty awesome, but the best thing to do is get all your friends to move onto ICQ (The good one) And use that. Or conform to your friend’s precious MSN. I hate that protocol.

14

SpywareGuard

A nifty little piece of software. You install it and it cuts down on your intake of spyware. If you make sure it’s set to activate upon startup, you’ll never know it’s there.

The site also hosts a spyware cleaner called SpywareBlaster, but I’ve never tried it, so I can’t say how reliable it is.

CleanUP!

Another handy program that cleans your computer out. Wipes out useless temp files and other such things quickly and easily.

15

I would suggest using Vivisimo as your default search engine. Google is great, especially because of it’s image search, but Vivisimo breaks your search into categories so you don’t have to go through every single site in a giant list.

16

I’d reccomend SpyBot, Ad-Aware, Microsoft AntiSpyware, or SpySweeper above SpywareGuard. One of those costs $30, though.

17

<a href=“http://www.videolan.org/vlc/”>VLC</a>

Good for playing movies and DVDs. Lots of adjustable stuff, so even if your screen sucks, it can work (brightness, mm).

18

http://www.abisource.com/
Free word processing software site.

19

EditPlus - A great, extendible text editor with syntax highlighting for basically any markup or programming language (HTML, C, Java, etc. etc.). Basically supports absolutely everything and you can create your own user shortcut tools (e.g. to compile and run programs).

7-zip Totally free zip/unzip program that properly handles files like .7z and .tar.bz which many other programs foul up. I think the latest version of PowerArchiver is either adware or a trial version.

WinMerge - an awesome tool which allows you to compare different versions of a file to see the changes that happened.

FileZilla - no relation to Mozilla, but it’s a free, multi-featured FTP program that works great. Of course, RPGC staffers get to use WS_FTP Pro for free, ‘cause good ol’ Mr. Sat got us a mass product license.

20

MozBackup This makes it really damn easy to back up stuff from a bunch of Mozilla programs. It saved my life when I was moving all my mail from my PC to my laptop. Saved my life.