I couldn’t do without a proper text editor. Windows comes with Notepad, but a more versatile one does all kinds of things some of us find indispensable. I use The Semware Editor, but other brands have their fans. The point is to get one and get good at it and write the macros or other little programs you want for it. For example, I programmed the F11 key to move the current line, and the cursor with it, up by one. And I programmed the F12 to move down likewise. This is so handy I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it. I think TSE costs about $50 these days.
I also keep PureText on my laptop, so it loads automatically. This is a little program that has an icon in the system tray. If there is text in the clipboard, clicking the icon reduces the text in the clipboard to straight ASCII text, without any formatting. That way, it’s easy to past things from various sources into one body of text without it looking like a ransome note. PureText is available free but they do say they’d like donations.
If you need a terminal program, and you aren’t calling bullitin boards with it, get RealTerm. It is great for talking to instruments and industrial controls, for example. It doesn’t assume there is a modem anywhere - that’s what Hyperterminal is for. One time I was debugging a datalogger and had to try all kinds of things, and it wasn’t until I tried adding a variable number of milliseconds between each character that the cause became obvious. RealTerm did this easily, whereas there is no way in the world to do that with Hyperterminal.
For manipulating images, I suggest Picture Window, made by Digital Light & Color. A very serious photographer recommended it to me, and it’s been wine and roses since. I have the Pro version, for about $90, but I had the $40 version for a while and think both were very good bargains.
If you need a finite element solver for partial differential equations, I highly praise FlexPDE. It is incredibly versatile, with a simple but beautiful language for describing problems, and excellent graphics. The developer has always been very helpful and even added a program feature at my request. I have used it for heat transfer, low Reynolds number computational fluid dynamics, absorption of radiation, stress/strain, electrostatics, and magnetism. It is also easy to integrate with other programs. At a few hundred bucks, it’s a steal, and they have good deals for students too.
If you want to do programming, you can get C# in Visual Studio as a free download from Microsoft. This thing feels like a million dollar program, to me.
So, with all these ideas, you can put together a pretty powerful machine, with better technical capabilities than an entire University would have had just 50 years ago. And you can do it with the software costing less than the laptop.
Maybe you aren’t trying to solve differential equations. Beats the hell out of me, where all the normal people are on this one.
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