# Windows users



## MannDude (Dec 7, 2013)

I recently got a Windows desktop from a friend, and want to use it as a media / gaming PC. I've not used Windows in years, and I've found Win7 to be extremely frustrating so far however am beginning to cope. Was curious what tools and programs are available that I should look into?

Whats a good email client

Free virus/malware protection that is decent

SSH client

Media client (I assume VLC is likely the best)

How do I disable all these g'damned warning that popup everytime I try to do something?

Good network tools?

Any links to tips, tricks, etc for a Windows noob (sorta).

I've not really used Windows since XP, and 7/8 is real foreign to me. PC came with Win7, and while I'll do a dualboot to Linux it's nice being able to watch Netflix again and playing games occasionally. It's just sort of sitting on a crappy free desk in the corner of my room so I want to put it to use, but before I really do anything I wanted to ask here.


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## Wintereise (Dec 7, 2013)

> Whats a good email client

Thunderbird from Mozilla.

> Free virus/malware protection that is decent

AVG Free, or Microsoft Security Essentials. Coupled with common sense , you shouldn't need anything else.

> SSH client

Putty.

> Media client (I assume VLC is likely the best)

Not even close. VLC is an abomination, really. Get MPC-HC, fully open source too.

> How do I disable all these g'damned warning that popup everytime I try to do something?

That's User Account Control (UAC), and should be left on. It's there to cover *your* ass, really -- and people get used to it. Think of it like sudo on a Linux system.

> Good network tools?

What exactly are you trying to do? ping/traceroute (or, 'tracert') come by default, netstat exists as well. Anything fancier, well, I'll need to know what exactly you want to do.


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## SPINIKR-RO (Dec 7, 2013)

> Whats a good email client

Thunderbird

> AV

Microsoft ships one now for free. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

They also ship a malware utility: http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/malware-removal.aspx

Start > Run > msrt (i think) > OK

Most people dont realize these exist.

>SSH client

Putty

>Media client (I assume VLC is likely the best)

VLC what I use, dont need it much really.

> How do I disable all these g'damned warning that popup everytime I try to do something?

Windows

> Network tools

Start > Run > cmd > OK

Basic stuff like ping tracert netstat, etc.

Advanced you could download wireshark,nmap etc.


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## MannDude (Dec 7, 2013)

Wintereise said:


> > Whats a good email client
> 
> Thunderbird from Mozilla.
> 
> ...


Thanks!

I'll look into these.

As far as network stuff goes, just things for local home networking mainly. I may use this as a media PC, have never networked Windows and Linux stuff together. Have never even looked into it. This is a low priority right now.

Text editors? I think NotePad++ was the best back when I was on Windows. Still the best?

Uhh... lets see... I'm sure there is other things too. I know FileZilla is on PC too, even though I used to use CuteFTP back in the day. I assume FileZilla is what everyone uses nowadays?

WinAmp is dead... but used to use it back in my Windows days... whats a similar, lightweight, thing for music? I do not want iTunes.

Hmm... what else?


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## SPINIKR-RO (Dec 7, 2013)

> Text editors? 

I use OpenOffice , for coding type stuff its UltraEdit

> I assume FileZilla is what everyone uses nowadays?

That or WinSCP

> I do not want iTunes.

I like Media Monkey cause I have a big library and have always like the organizations etc. Lately though I just use spotify.


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## Wintereise (Dec 8, 2013)

> Music player

Hands down foobar2000, any audiophile will agree that nothing better exists.

> Text editors? I think NotePad++ was the best back when I was on Windows. Still the best?

Probably still the best, I use it anyway.

> I assume FileZilla is what everyone uses nowadays?

Unless you're after something not offered by Fz, pretty much, yes. Just make sure to avoid the malware sourceforge bundles with the downloads these days (It's opt in).

> As far as network stuff goes, just things for local home networking mainly. I may use this as a media PC, have never networked Windows and Linux stuff together. Have never even looked into it. This is a low priority right now.

If you want to make a media server / DLNA server, you'll need third party stuff. Windows can mount nfs/cifs natively, ftp/webdav are natively possible as well.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Dec 8, 2013)

MannDude said:


> WinAmp is dead... but used to use it back in my Windows days... whats a similar, lightweight, thing for music? I do not want iTunes.


Dead soon, but not quite yet.  You can still grab the binaries to install and hold onto.  Personally, the only thing I use outside of mplayer is Subsonic.


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## MannDude (Dec 8, 2013)

Is there a command prompt replacement? Why can't I copy/paste outputs?

I just did did a tracert to something, and if I wanted to share it I'd have to screenshot it.

=/

EDIT: Oh... I can right click, select all, then ctrl+c.... but that's not quite ideal.


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## Wintereise (Dec 8, 2013)

@Manndude, you can actually copy paste.

Hit right click -> select mark, then select with the left button. Once done, just right click again.

Whatever you selected is now on your clipboard.

That said, I find the powershell (or, ISE) prompt to be far better, and more flexible. You should probably consider switching to it (Same method of copy pasting applies)


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## mikho (Dec 8, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Is there a command prompt replacement? Why can't I copy/paste outputs?
> 
> 
> I just did did a tracert to something, and if I wanted to share it I'd have to screenshot it.
> ...


Change the properties for the command window, enable quickedit. Then it works like putty with left-click copy/paste. 

A little hint regarding quickedit. Select it in the properties to change it in the active window AND change the default settings to change it in every window that you open thereafter.


If you only change the default option it will not set it for the current window.


Something that I recommend people who are trying out windows is portableapps.com


Applications packaged to be run from USB devices but can be installed to a local drive aswell.


What you miss out is the file associations but you can try the application out and i you don't like it, delete the directory and there will be no trace of it left on your computer.


When it comes to applications that I regulary use is mRemoteNG. One application to handle remote connections like ssh, rdp, citrix and so on....


It is not perfect on any part but good enough for me since I can have it all in one application.


Email: if you only have pop3 and imap accounts, Thunderbird.


I've worked with windows whole my life so any questions, shoot. 


Edit: fixed a few errors, to fatty fingers to write on the phone.


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## blergh (Dec 8, 2013)

MannDude said:


> Whats a good email client
> 
> Free virus/malware protection that is decent
> 
> ...


Thunderbird

NOD32 (You can get it for "free")

Putty Connection Manager

VLC/Foobar

You can disable the escalation-shit but i would suggest not to.


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## patz (Dec 8, 2013)

I use Bitvise ssh client for ssh connections.


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## notFound (Dec 8, 2013)

On my Winblows PC:

1) Thunderbird (I don't mind Outlook tbh, but non free ofc)
2) Default security essentials + windows defender + don't visit dodgy porn sites
3) SecureCRT (non-free), best free would be KiTTY and there are many tabbed PuTTY/KiTTY applications you can find
4) VLC can play almost everything
5) Somewhere in control panel you an turn it off
6) mtr application, but I don't like the gui. If you want linux tools I use pywin32.


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## Sunshine (Dec 8, 2013)

Welcome to the dark side. But I guess that we don't have much of a choice if we want to play PC games  Would be nice if Steam could help turn that around (you know, with their new Linux based console thing).

Anyways...


(freeware or open source, unless otherwise noted)

Email client: *Thunderbird* or *Windows Live Mail* (Windows Essentials).

Antivirus: common sense and keep everything updated at all times (Windows, your web browser, Flash, Java, PDF reader, Thunderbird, etc).

AV software is a band-aid solution for people that screw up. Don't screw up  You shouldn't be exposing yourself to threats in the first place. I know that's easier said than done for most people (my parents are hopeless, and so are most of my friends), but you seem like an intelligent person.

Common sense means:

- not clicking strange e-mail attachments or following links, even if sent to you by a friend (they could be compromised and sending out crap to their contact list)

- don't fall victim to phishing e-mails and/or websites

- don't send money to a nigerian prince

- don't click popups from websites telling you to upgrade something on your computer (this is easy to screw up if it looks like a Flash update or something)

- be careful if you are trying to download a media file and it downloads an .exe file instead

- be critical of every single piece of software you download from the Internet, and only download from websites that you trust

- basically, be smart about it when browsing the web (I can't list everything here)

- don't let other people use your computer... they will screw up and click "funny lolcats.exe"

- be careful with USB-sticks from strangers

- disable the hiding of filename extensions in windows file explorer, so that it's easier to tell .exe from .jpg

- and so on, and so forth

Even a legitimate non-shady website can be serving up a 0-day browser exploit through a banner ad (or their own website got compromised). AV is not a guarentee that you won't get infected. Browsing through a VM is a good precaution, but VM-busting exploits exist. But we're talking rare extremes here, so nevermind that.

There's no such thing as perfect safety, but you can minimize the attack surface. Most importantly, keep every software on your computer up-to-date at all times. And if you can put up with it, use *noscript* for FireFox and not allow plugins such as Flash to run by default. Even if there is a 0-day in Flash, noscript will minimize the potential for that to get exploited. Disable or uninstall Java completely unless you really need it.

And I got a bit off-topic here... but you did ask about antivirus 

Anyways, if you must: *Avast free version* but it will not save your ass from everything. *Kaspersky* if you're willing to pay some money. *Outpost Security Suite* is free and has a decent application firewall (but is useless if you mindlessly click "okay" to everything). *Malwarebytes* removes a lot of malware.

SSH client: *Putty*. Set up profiles for your servers and then auto-type passwords with *KeePass* (great password manager, by the way). There are also some tabbed putty versions and other similar clients, but I never found one that I really liked.

Word of advice: Perhaps you should be using this Windows machine only for gaming / media and not be accessing anything critical from it.

Video player: *MPC-HC* has great video quality. Get the *CCCP* codec pack. *GOM Media Player* has some really neat features. *VLC* plays YouTube URLs and can also stream to other devices or encode (e.g. to an .mp4 file). VLC plays pretty much anything you throw at it, so it can be useful as a very simple tool for encoding stuff to another format.

Video conversion: *VLC* or *Handbrake* if you want to keep it simple.

Music player: *Foobar2000*. I agree with Wintereise, it rocks.

Office suite: *LibreOffice*. Forget about OpenOffice. The community has moved to Libre. Perhaps Apache can turn things around, but let's see what happends. Pratically speaking, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are pretty similar, so you can pick either one of them.

Text editors: *Notepad++* and *PSPad* are decent text editors for coding or whatever. *Sublime Text* is awesome but not free (unlimited trial version, affordable license).

ZIP tools: *IzArc* is a nice freeware that feels like WinRAR (unlike that 7-zip thing).

FTP / SFTP: *FileZilla* or *WinSCP*. They're both pretty nice. (And yeah, those SourceForge adware installers are the work of the devil. Use my link to get a clean FileZilla installer. Pick the latest win32-setup.exe).

Defrag: *MyDefrag* (do not defrag SSD).

Cool geeky tools: Get the free *SysInternals Suite*. It has a ton of useful stuff, like the "whois" command line tool for looking up domains, the Process Explorer tool, etc.

Virtual Machines: Feeling a little homesick? Boot up your favorite Linux distro in a VM. In a window or full screen, you'll feel right at home.

- *Microsoft Virtual PC* is... meh. But easy to use and works well.

- *VMWare* is great, but takes a bit of tinkering to create new VM's using only the free player version. The paid versions are more fun.

- *VirtualBox* works really well and is easy to use. You'd probably want to go with this one.
 

DVD burning: *ImgBurn*.

Image viewer: *IrfanView*. It reads and saves a lot of image formats. Also nice for batch processing images, resizing, renaming, whatever. The default image resizing algorithm "Lanczos" is really good if you care about that sort of thing.

That's off the top of my head, without getting into specialized software


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## WebSearchingPro (Dec 8, 2013)

The holy grail of fast windows setups - http://ninite.com/

Its great stuff, I've used it to deploy computer labs, home computers ect ect.


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## Leyton (Dec 8, 2013)

AntiVirus: MSE or NOD32, and Malwarebytes

Office: LibreOffice

Mail: Thunderbird is still good

Archives: 7zip

FTP/SCP: WinSCP

SSH: mRemoteNG and KiTTY (PuTTY fork)

Text Editor: NP++ is still good, SublimeText is awesome, and the port of Geany is quite nice. 

Music: I now use Spotify for my music, but that's not quite the same. Foobar2000 is solid in my experience.

And as @WebSearchingPro said, Ninite is your friend


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## blergh (Dec 8, 2013)

WebSearchingPro said:


> The holy grail of fast windows setups - http://ninite.com/
> 
> Its great stuff, I've used it to deploy computer labs, home computers ect ect.


How could i have missed this? This is awesome, thanks!


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## Shados (Dec 8, 2013)

Sunshine said:


> Defrag: *MyDefrag* (do not defrag SSD).


Sequential reads & writes are still much faster on an SSD than random ones, and you're not going to significantly impact the life of any modern SSD by doing this. Why would you not want to defrag?


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## Sunshine (Dec 8, 2013)

Shados said:


> Sequential reads & writes are still much faster on an SSD than random ones, and you're not going to significantly impact the life of any modern SSD by doing this. Why would you not want to defrag?


Yeah that does sound logical  but I've heard it was a bad thing to do with SSD because it wears them out. Whether that's true for all SSD, I don't know. Just thought I'd throw in that warning, just in case.

A quick google...


http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/298108-32-defragging-year-never



> Defragging on HDDs is done to put all of the sectors of any given large file together, reducing seek time when reading the file sequentially. On an SSD, this is meaningless because the "sector addresses" (not sure of the right term) used by the OS are mapped all over the place on the SSD by the optimization code. a) the defrag wouldn't make the actual data contiguous, and b ) Even if it were, there is no benefit to physical contiguity on an SSD.
> 
> Plus, defragging will result in massive write-amplification and wear your SSD cells unneccessarily.



http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Does-defragmenting-an-SSD-cause-any-long-term-performance-loss/ta-p/71051



> The short answer is this: you don't have to defrag your SSD.
> 
> To understand why, we need to look at the purpose of defragmenting. Defragging ensures that large files are stored in one continuous area of a hard disc driveso that it can be read in one go.  Mechanical drives have a relatively long seek time of approximately 15ms, so every time a file is fragmented you lose 15ms finding the next one, And this really adds up when reading lots of different files split into lots of different fragments.
> 
> ...


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## Raymii (Dec 8, 2013)

If you want your package manager back, I've heard good things about Chocolatay: http://chocolatey.org/



And it has an RVM like install process:


```
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin
```


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## nunim (Dec 9, 2013)

Leyton said:


> ..  FTP/SCP: WinSCP
> 
> SSH: mRemoteNG and KiTTY (PuTTY fork)
> 
> Text Editor: NP++ is still good, SublimeText is awesome, and the port of Geany is quite nice. ..


SecureCRT is great but PuTTY works just fine.  Your text editor suggestions are right on the money, hard to beat NotePad++ or Sublime, although Geany is also great.   I'm surprised no one has mentioned SmartFTP yet, it's the best FTP/SFTP/FTPS/SCP client I've ever used.


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## Leyton (Dec 9, 2013)

nunim said:


> SecureCRT is great but PuTTY works just fine.  Your text editor suggestions are right on the money, hard to beat NotePad++ or Sublime, although Geany is also great.   I'm surprised no one has mentioned SmartFTP yet, it's the best FTP/SFTP/FTPS/SCP client I've ever used.


SecureCRT is great too. The reason I mention KiTTY is that before 08/13, PuTTY hadn't received any more updates or features (and still has only had 1 bugfix issued since then), and KiTTY continued the development with regular bugfixes and some nice additional features (see: http://www.9bis.net/kitty/).

If you use mRemoteNG or WinSCP (or anything else that let's you launch an SSH session to PuTTY), you can drop the KiTTY binary over the top of it - and voila, the sessions launch in KiTTY.

Personally, I like the connection management of mRemoteNG (coupled with KiTTY), and then I have integrated mRemoteNG with WinSCP so that at the click of a button, it launches an SCP connection the the current folder in mRemoteNG's KiTTY install.I just like the way you can tie these applications together.


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## WebSearchingPro (Dec 9, 2013)

I actually use RoyalTS as my SSH client, it was a continuation of the original mRemote, its got a few cool features such as session recording and playback and encryption of all the stored credentials and connection info. One thing its missing though is SCP. But Filezilla handles that just fine.

SublimeText3 is quite an awesome text editor, I was using notepad++ but they don't even compare when you bring in emmet and some of the other time saving features.


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## mikho (Dec 9, 2013)

A nice to have feature with mremoteng is the sql support. You can save your connections and share it among multple clients.


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## BuyCPanel-Kevin (Dec 9, 2013)

A good email client would be Mozilla Thunder bird. I like comodo firewall, they have a free version too. Putty for the ssh client, and you're right on for the media client, VLC. You login as an administrator? Enjoy!


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## MannDude (Dec 12, 2013)

What about hard disk tools? I've got a stack of old drives from PCs I've had over the years, one in particular I really want to recover. I'm running TestDisk on it now, but happy to take suggestions of other tools.


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