Windows XP must haves!!????!!!!

[bigbrat41]

I am in need of your experience. I am asking for your recommendations regarding XP (home) tools. I am asking in this forum as my most pressing concern is an XP boot CD.
What tools (utilities) for Xp do you consider necessary? (I am willing to purchase but would prefer Free as I know there are some good ones)

1- a boot CD (are the 1's on E-bay better than.....?)
2-Registry Manager what is best, which is free, no, which is the simplest
3-

Aw heck, I'm not even sure what to ask. The bottem line is

What do I need to keep this bloody thing running at it's best and to recover from problems?

Any and all suggestions will be appreciated
Thank you

 

[SNGX1275]

Ultimate Boot CD contains a lot of tools, most of which you will never use, but its a good thing to have.
Free antivirus, AVG 7.5 and Avast seem to be popular.
Opera browser, extremely safe, moreso than firefox, perhaps because of smaller user base drawing less attention.
Lavasoft AdAware to clean up the mess you get from occationally running IE.

 

[bigbrat41]

Thanx SNGX

I am currently running Panda Internet Suite, Adaware, and Spybot. Will check the UBCD.
Anyone else, please??

 

[Hatrick]

Absolutely essential is a disk imaging programme like Drive Image, Ghost or Acronis True Image. As long as you use it intelligently you can recover from just about any disaster, except hardware faults, in half an hour and need never go through the dreary routine of having to reinstall.
The second item is a good backup programme or routine, because an imaging programme does not save current data.

 

[klaw24]

Here are some of the tools that I personally use:


Ultimate Boot CD [Swiss-knife]
Bart PE (XP Live CD) [Excellent, saved me many times]
Avast Home Edition [Antivirus]
CCleaner [Junk file cleaner]
Page Defrag [Defrag Paging File]
Regseeker [Clean Registry]
NT Registry Optimizer [Compact registry]
Spybot Search n Destroy [Anti-spyware]
Tweak-UI [Tweaking tool]
XPLite [Remove unwanted Windows components]
Diskeeper Pro [Better than Windows defrag methinks]

 

[Hatrick]

Yes, I forgot Diskeeper - excellent. I've used Page Defrag but always found that Diskeeper, with its Set And Forget function, had always done the job first.

 

[bigbrat41]

Please keep them coming!!

Thank you all.

To anyone else, ALL input will be welcomed.

 

[bigbrat41]

Bump, c'mon only 3 answers???

I am sure there are more folks in this forum who have experienced opinions about which utilities are necessary to run XP smoothly.
Please let me take advantage of your wisdom.

Thank you to those who have answered and to those who will

 

[Hatrick]

SendTo Toys, Listfolders, Foxit Reader (instead of Adobe), 'Open Office' and any browser but IE.

 

[matt2971]

All of this is freeware... some has already been mentioned but I'll include URLs. It's in No Particular Order...

xPlorer2 File manager:

http://www.zabkat.com/x2lite.htm

C-Cleaner cleanup utility:

http://www.ccleaner.com/ccdownload.asp

Ad-Aware anti spyware:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

Spybot S&D anti-spyware:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Icesword anti-rootkit:

http://www.blogcn.com/user17/pjf/index.html

Regscanner (fast reg searching)

http://www.nirsoft.net/

Keepass password storage:

http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

XNview image editor / viewer / manager:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html

foobar2000 music player:

http://www.foobar2000.org/

7-zip compressor / decompressor:

http://www.7-zip.org/

CD Burner XP Pro:

http://www.cdburnerxp.se/download.php

Clipdiary clipboard manager:

http://softvoile.com/clipdiary/download.php

Foxit PDF Reader:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

G-Spot codec info for finding what codecs videos are using:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/download.html

Locate32 Win search function replacement:

http://www.uku.fi/~jmhuttun/english/index.html

Renamer multi-file renaming:

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~den4b/

Stroke It mouse gestures:

http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/downloads.shtml

Unlocker file unlocker:

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/#download

Volumouse mouse-controlled volume:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/volumouse.html

Winext - I love this, not to everyones taste:

http://winext.hulubulu.dk/

Regcleaner 4.3:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download460.html

Drive Snapshot online disk imager (not sure if freeware- i have a licensed copy thru work):

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

Process Explorer task manager replacement:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

USBDeview for managing / removing USB devices on the fly:

http://www.nirsoft.net/

VLC media player:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/



That should keep you going! ;-)

Oh, and I agree - diskeeper is a good product; again I have a copy via work.