Previously, in my days of (possible) piracy of everything, installing all the software after reinstalling Windows was a pain. You had to download the latest version of the program from the website or torrent tracker, you had to install every program by itself, if it was from torrent tracker, you had to apply some kind of crack or jump through the goops in order to make it work. Later, came one of the greatest tools ever – Ninite, you could choose programs you want to install and get this bundle of apps (only those, that were free, of course). You still had to install cracked apps separately, but it was much lesser pain.
Today I don’t have questionable software on my computer and this time I’ve decided to download programs only as I need them. That way I won’t have cluttered laptop right away and it’s pretty easy to download and install something if I need it. So, I wanted to take time and write about all those apps that allow me to do my work, study and helped me not to lose all the data.
Microsoft Office 2013. I’ve mentioned it in previous post about reinstalling Windows. This is a great piece of software. You can start using it even before it installed on your PC, streaming apps is a very cool idea. Also it comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage space, I’ll talk about that a bit later. And for the price I paid It’s almost free – 70€ for 4 years. The greatest deal.
Microsoft OneDrive. Let’s get all the Microsoft products right out of the way. I’ve used Dropbox for a long time and love the product. They have some very interesting features, like saving Screenshots. (Windows 8 also saves screenshots if you press Win+PrintScreen). Also it offers integration with all sorts of services, but since I’ve started using Office 2013, I’ve migrated all my documents to OneDrive, integration with Office makes using it a lot easier.
Dropbox. I’m using it for the photo backup. It would make more sense to use 1TB of OneDrive for that, but Dropbox works with photos so much better, especially automatic photo uploader on Android.
Evernote. This one is interesting. Like Dropbox, I’ve been a user of Evernote for a long time, but I still have trouble managing it. I can’t find the system that works for me. Mostly I’ve tried everything tied to Notebooks, I still have to try managing everything using tags or try to use Google Keep. I dump all the articles I find interesting there, but then rarely read them.
Spotify. After Spotify came to Latvia, it became the only place I listen to the music. I’ve had couple of albums bought in iTunes, but I don’t have iTunes installed on my laptop for a long time. I cache one big playlist to my laptop, so I have something to listen to at all times.
Chrome. I’ve tried to use the newest IE for a couple of weeks and really liked it, but the lack of extensions just kills it. So still using Chrome as my main browsers. Ones in a while, I try every other of big browsers, but nothing matches Chrome, unfortunately.
That’s all the software I’ve installed after installing new OS and this is mostly stuff I do use daily. There are probably other programs I’ll install later, but I use those rarely, comparing to the main ones.