Pollywogs!

So I’ve been reinstalling windows for folks at a furious clip lately, I think I’ve done about four boxes so far and have another one or two left.  To save re-downloading the same files that I install over and over, I pasted the most essential files onto a flash drive.  These are open source or freeware programs, that when added to a blank XP installation (or Micro2k3), create a useable environment much like a default Ubuntu install.  Here is currently what is on my flash drive:

7zip – handles practically any archive you throw at it, super fast, small and free

CCleaner – cleans the cruft out of Windows that builds up over time

CDBurnerXP – burns data & music CDs & DVDs.  Requires Microsoft .NET 2.0

Chrome – Google’s browser.  I’m in love…

Firefox – Installed for compatibility purposes.  Slow dog compared to Chrome…

Go OO – An optimized version of OpenOffice 3.0

Howie’s Screen Capture – The best freeware screen capture utility, super small, fast & free

Flash Player 10 – the installer for ‘other broswers’.  Fuck IE…

IrfanView – basic image viewer, with some minor manipulations capabilities, small & fast.  Crops, resizes, etc…

JkDefrag – simple, fast hard drive defragmentation utility.

Pidgin – simple, fast instant messenger (seeing a pattern in the programs I prefer?)

Songbird – a splurge, this is a ripoff of iTunes.  iTunes is a bloated mess, but manages iPods.  This does the same functions, with slightly less bloat.  Version 1.0 doesn’t suck, finally…

ThunderBird – when people won’t take “GMail” as an answer…

uTorrent – for downloading large files over the internet ~.^

VLC – this is the only video player you will ever need.  

wxDownload Fast – this also downloads large files over the internet, but in a less shady fashion…

WinDirStat – this program is more useful on existing installs, it graphically displays a hard drive and lets you easily see where your Space Hogs are residing (makes it easy to delete them too!)

I created a .torrent file in case you may find having this collection of files downloaded all at once useful.  Grab it here.

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I recently found someone had created a CD with vaguely similar goals, providing a useful range of open source software on a CD for Wintel machines.  They are called The Open Disc project.  I couldn’t find a .torrent file for the disc for some reason, and using a torrent to distribute large files makes The Only Sense, so I downloaded it locally and uploaded a torrent to The Pirate Bay here.  This is a useful disc to have laying around, much more comprehensive than my flash drive and purely open source software.