9 Must Have Tools in a Computer for Daily Use

Not even 10.

If you are reading this, then its obsolete that you have a PC at your disposal. And reading a blog on a PC in an internet café or in office is even though not uncommon, I would assume that you are reading in a PC owned and taken care by you. What would your immediate applications be no sooner than you have formatted and installed the required audio and video drivers? Do you have a long list of them? If so, is registry backup being taken prior to the installation of any software? Is there a restore point for your PC?Hope you have got all these in hand before installing any authentic or unauthorized software. I narrowed down on the most required softwares that we would work on or that we would need very much and which are to be on a naked(no pun intended) system.

The order is not a strict one. You have the liberty to install them in any order as you wish, but, do take a system restore point before installing any software. Yeah, I have specified this twice, because, it’s so important. Now with the list.

1. Direct X 9.0C : This is a must-installed-tool if you are going to use Windows XP. DX9C is a collection of drivers which enable your system to run audio and video rich applications without a glitch. If not installed, your PC would show a clumsy video or your audio wouldn’t be audible with the clarity that you always wish it would. It helps in delivering the windows based computers to run and display applications rich in multimedia elements such as graphics, 3D motion, video and rich audio. It also includes the regular security patches from Microsoft along with performance related issues and helps in delivering the bridge between various applications using the Direct X APIs. If you have laptop or a tablet pc running on XP, do check whether you have this latest version installed or not. You can do so by going to Start -> Run ->dxdiag(stands for DirectX DIAGnosis). At the bottom of the details section you can look at the version which your system has now.

If not, you can download the latest version from Microsoft Direct X Download Page.

Do not think to download Direct X 10 because not all computers do support that technology yet. Time has to pass still for the D to reign.

2. OpenOffice : It’s a replacement for the commercial Microsoft Office and it doesn’t have any feature less than MS Office. You can work on Document, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Graphics, Databases and many more. What’s the catch? None. It’s absolutely FREE and is supported by the Open Source Community. Kudos guys.

You can download OpenOffice for Free from Here.

3. AVG Antivirus : This is a great anti-virus software with regular updates using which you can protect the computer from any harmful viruses, worms, trojans, and all that junk which would slow down your system and consume the resources. The regular updates do provide robust security while enabling you to be least worried. The free version is quite stable for domestic purposes and is quite operational against the malwares.

You can get the free basic version of AVG Antivirus Here.

4. VLC Media Player : Stands for VideoLan Codec Media Player. No computer is fully useful enough until and unless it can play audio and video. This media player completes this section of installing a suitable and perfect media player ever built. VLC can play any kind of media that you can throw on it. You are provided with various options internally and this even allows you to play video as your wallpaper on your desktop. Unbelievable? Believe it. It surely does and you can even take a snapshot of the frame that you wish to just like this.

VLC Media Player is so powerful and so popular that it is downloaded at least a 30 times as you read this text. Check this. Click the below image for bigger size. So that you can read it.

In addition you can also download and install K-Lite Codec Pack if you assume you would be having those file formats which even VLC would not be able to play.

5. WinRar : Winrar is a zip/unzip tool similar to WinZip but can handle most of the famous compression formats that exist. Winrar uses a complex algorithm which reduces the size of the zipped/rared files that you would use it widely when sending any bulky files as attachment. Its quite a powerful archive manager. While WinZip provides the user to zip the files with a .zip format only, WinRar provides the users with archiving the files with a .rar/.zip extension. You choose the best based on what others would be using when they find your attachments.

6. WinAmp : The most widely used application to play the audio files. Provides a best solution to play various formats of audio files and enhances the user experience with a wide range of plugins and visualizations that can woo the user.

Winamp also provides the features of skinning your media player to suit your desktop environment.

You can download Winamp’s Latest Version from the Winamp Download Page.

7. Paint.Net : An alternate application of Adobe Photoshop to edit images and let your creative side take a ride. Paint.Net is a tiny application which is simple, easy to use and has a veru innovative user interface. It does not possess a steep learning curve and you would not take much time to quickly gasp it’s efficient working and you can even handle multiple images easily.

An intuitive feature from Paint.net is it has a thumbnailed tab interface so that you would not have the need to remember the file names. The images that you are working on are shown as thumbnails making it easier to pluck out the desired image.

You can download the latest version from Paint.Net Download Page.

8. Cute PDF : Create PDF Files on the fly without the usual Acrobat bogging up system resources and using the network to download the so-called security updates. You can even edit the PDF files using this application which is easy to use and very intuitive. It provides no system hiccups and offers numerous facilities like merging multiple pdf files, rearrange pages, setup headers and footers and add watermarks, along with many other features.

You can download the free version from the Cute PDF Download Page.

9. Fire Fox 3 : The World’s favorite browser. Contradicting the monopoly of Internet Explorer, Mozilla group of programmer and developers, better referred to as evangelists designed and developed this no-fuss internet browser which enhances the internet browsing experience. Combined with numerous add-ons, you would use no other tool once you start and get used to this browser. With more than 8 Million downloads in 24 hours, Mozilla team has setup a world record in the most used softwares ever. Have a peek at it at Mozilla Home page.

What more, You can get a Certificate with your name saying Thanks for downloading the awesome browser.

Check the Team Nirvana’s Certificate:

Mozilla’s FireFox 3 is released in most of the languages. So, if you speak other language than English, feel free to check the localized versions of Fire Fox.

Hope your system is up and running at it’s supposed speed now. Feel free to share if you have or if you think I should have included other than what I have mentioned here.