Blender is an excellent 3d graphics program. It’s even got a great community so virtually anybody can learn a thing or two.
Are you, perhaps, confusing the full Acrobat with Reader? You can’t embed video with Reader, nor can you fill and save forms. From what I understand, Reader just allows you to view a PDF, nothing else.
I don’t know about the security, but as far as reading PDFs, I haven’t noticed Reader to be slow at all. I click on a PDF, it opens in Reader in a couple of seconds. What more should I expect?
Stalled Printer Repair - For when there’s a print job stuck in the queue and you can’t delete it. It’s fast and easy.
Google Sketchup. Easy and quick 3-D modeling of almost anything you can think of. The perfect middle point between cocktail-napkin simple and full plates of drafting.
Most of what I use has already been suggested. I’ll just add:
Foobar - Good lightweight music player.
Google’s Picasa - Easily to use picture organizer.
That is a great one! I don’t know what bloody minded bastard wrote the Windows printing subsystem, but he had issues. A stalled print job can survive a fucking reboot of both the computer and printer! Argh!
Why pay for your operating system?
Firefox - Often overlooked, but browsers are one of the most important pieces of software.
Wesnoth, a pretty fun TBS game.
There’s plenty of other free software I use too.
Thanks for that one. Shaved off some time there and more memory left. Highly recommended.
Reader does allow you to fill in forms. It also plays videos embedded in PDFs (though you’re right that you need Acrobat to create those PDFs in the first place).
I use evince, and it opens a PDF in a lot less than a couple of seconds, but starting Reader takes at least half a minute on my machine.
I used Soluto before my recent re-install, and it bogged down my start-up. But it may have just been conflicting with about 2.5 years of installed, uninstalled, re-installed, and/or updated programs. My start-up did work faster after uninstalling Soluto. Maybe now that my windows build is much cleaner, I can try it again.
I love TextPad. It’s pretty basic, just for creating text, but it loads big files wicked fast and lets you toggle word wrapping.
Truecrypt - because keeping secrets is awesome. Good place to store passwords, account info and supersecret goatpr0n safe in case your computer gets nicked.
I love you and wish to have your babies.
I’ve had to use both of these for my uni projects, and I love them both.
Would it work on enterprise network print queues? Coz if so I will bear your children or give you a kidney. I’m so sick of fucking knobheads jamming the print queue with massive PDFs and then FUCKING OFF so that they can’t be deleted without a call to the helpdesk.
Since Firefox has gotten a lot of love in this thread, I am going to throw Google Chrome in here. It is my browser of choice.
I will also mention Avira Antivirus. It removed a virus I had that AVG missed and seems to have less of a footprint on my system.
Mp3directcut, for direct editing of mp3s
http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html
Eraser, for securely deleting files
http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/
(Way back when, my main use for eraser was for deleting large numbers of files under win98, faster and not likely to crash the OS)
I like ToDoList as a task manager.
I tried Open Office but had to get rid of it… far to buggy, lots of basic features just didn’t work properly and we simply didn’t have the time or energy to put up with it. MS Office, for all its criticism, just works for most home users.
CoreTemp to monitor processor temperatures discreetly: Core Temp
WinDirStat does a great job of visually identifying where all your hard drive space is being used and helps you decide where you can best save space: WinDirStat - Free download and software reviews - CNET Download
MyDefrag is a great defragmenter program that is so much better than the Windows defrag program: http://www.mydefrag.com/
Winplot - wonderful, versatile, easy-to-use mathematical graphing program.
If people bashed you as much, you’d have low self-esteem also.