I would like to start with two products from Sysinternals who have been recently hired by Microsoft. Their freeware is still free and available. I use Autoruns which is one of the best autostart managers around. It gathers all autostart information and displays them in various tabs making it easy to analyze and disable programs that you do not need that often that an autostart would be justified. The second tool is the famous Process Explorer which is a task manager on steroids. It shows additional information that the task manager does not, great for analyzing dependencies.

Multimedia:

Windows XP has the windows media player build in which is in my opinion to slow, to big and to insecure to use. I always install VLC, Video Lan Client, on my system. This freeware player can play many formats and reacts in an astounding speed. It does not support Real Player formats (but mov for instance). I suggest you get a copy of Real Alternative if you need to play Real Player files on your system, no need to install the slower Real Player.

I do like Winamp when it comes to playing mp3 files on my system. I prefer an older version of Winamp, the new one 5.x is having so many unwanted features which seems to make it slower than it should be. I want my software mp3 player to be fast and play mp3 files, that is all. I’m running version 2.9x of Winamp in the light version. It offers everything that I need.

Reading Pdf files with the Adobe Reader is slow. It loads dozens of unnecessary plugins and you have to wait a long time until it opens the file. Foxit Reader on the other hand is a freeware alternative which is fast, real fast. An alternative to Microsoft Office is Open Office. It is free, supports formats the Microsoft Office uses and is just incredible for a free office suit.

Everyone needs an image viewer, the windows xp one is crap as always. I started back then with ACDSee which is commercial by now, switched to Irfanview and finally found the ideal one XNView. It does not make that much of a difference though, I just like the way you use XnView better, that is all.

If you need a tool that offers advanced image editing you should take a look at GIMP. It offers everything users like you and me could possibly want from an image editing tool.

The Web:

I don’t want to write lots about browsers and email clients – I do prefer Firefox and Thunderbird but Opera is also a nice browser which should get more attention from the general audience.

Once in a while I want to download a website for offline browsing. This is nice if you have a notebook for instance and need some information of the web but won’t be able to access that information while not at home. Download the website, store it on the hard drive and you can access the information. HTTrack does that.

I do prefer Bitcomet over uTorrent because I received some errors in uTorrent that were not possible to fix at that time. Both are torrent clients by the way.

Everything Else:

Unlocker is a great utility for windows xp. If you ever wanted to delete a file and got the message that you could not do it because it is in use you know why unlocker is so great. It gets rid of the process that binds the file and you can safely delete it afterwards.

Myuninstaller adds functionality like multiple uninstalls at once to windows xp. It displays more information about a certain product, much more than windows xp does by itself. You can see the path where it is stored, the registry keys and much more.

I surely have missed some of the tools, let me know about them :)

I decided to keep the list small and divide it into two parts. The first part deals with all the tools, mostly security related that everyone should have on his computer that is running Windows XP, the second part, which will be an article of its own, deals with tools that are nice to have and a great asset to every XP installation.

I always start with security related tools which is IMHO the best approach. Fix the security concerns and concentrate on everything else afterwards. I start with AntiVir which is a great free anti virus tool that can be scheduled to update itself on a regular basis. Once Antivir is up and running I install XP Antispy which disables the phone home options that are built into windows xp. (next to many other settings that disable features no one really needs.

I do take a look at the services that are running and disable every service that is not needed. This is not part of the tutorial, I thought it would be still worth to mention this step.

After that I install either Spybot Search and Destroy or Ad-Aware. Both tools fight all sorts of spyware.

I’m not using a firewall which may seem odd to some users here. It created a heated discussion about a year ago. As you can see, my pc is still up and running and I’m still not using a firewall. I don’t really think there is a good free one out there.

Next on my list are Microsoft Powertoys for Windows XP, Tweak UI to be precise which gives you access to system settings.

Disk Cleaner is another excellent freeware that I install on the system, it is a one click get rid of all temporary files solution – able to remove cookies, temporary files and history from browsers such as firefox, ie and opera for instance.

I like to install Snadboys revelation as well, a free and easy to use tool that is able to show the password behind those *****. Pretty useful if you forgot a pass and need it urgently.

Last but not least I install True Crypt on the system, either as a container, which means a defined amount of space that is encrypted on a drive, or as a completely encrypted partition. Both have advantages and I recommend to use at least one of the two for all important documents.

That is the minimum, I know that there are more tools that are nice and can be installed and I would like to hear about them from you. Which tools do you install on every XP system ? Please note that I will write a second article about tools that are recommended but not security related like VLC, Firefox and Thunderbird.