If Santa’s dropped off a pristine new laptop or netbook on his rounds this year, then you’ll want to make sure you get the very best from it. With many manufacturers choosing to add value to their portables by cramming them with useless crapware and enough attention-seeking free trials to paralyse the average supercomputer, it pays to give your new arrival a bit of a TLC. We’ve thought of a few straightforward steps to make your laptop run smoothly from day one.
Firstly, don’t be shy of removing all that crapware. Much as we all love to have our sparkly new laptops pre-filled with junk, it is worth going over the list of installed programs with a fine toothcomb to weed out the useless from the useful. Do you really need that Microsoft Office 60-day trial, or that 30-day demo of Norton AntiVirus? No, you don’t. And don’t forget to look through each icon in the system tray and ask yourself whether it’s ever going to come in useful. Trim the pointless items from your startup folder, or better still uninstall them completely, and your laptop will start faster than ever.
Now you’ve rid your laptop of all that awful rubbish, it’s time to put something far more useful on there instead. You don’t need to go splashing your cash about though, as there’s plenty of free software that does a sterling job. Â
1.      Google Chrome - It’s not such a big issue with powerful laptops, but if you’re working with the more modest processing power of a netbook or ultraportable, we’d highly recommend installing Google Chrome. Whether it’s being run on a hulking desktop replacement or a lowly netbook, Google’s browser springs to life faster than any of its competitors. And, what’s more, its clutter-free display makes the absolute most of a netbook’s limited screen resolution.
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2.      OpenOffice.org – Ok, so it’s not a patch on the refined beauty of Office 2007, that’s for sure, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper. With a price tag of exactly zero pence it’s difficult to argue with such a fully-featured, highly usable office suite. Download it now and do some work, you know you want to.Â
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3.      VLC Media Player  – Ready for the less dull, pedestrian moments in your laptop’s existence, there are few better media players than VLC. It’s the swiss-army-knife of media players, capable of playing pretty much any music or movie file you can feed it. You need never suffer Windows Media Player ever again. Hopefully.
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4.      Live Mesh – If you’ve heard the Podcast in recent weeks, then chances are Tim, David or any number of the PC Pro team has wittered on about Microsoft’s latest wunderkind. What is it? Well, it’s online storage, essentially. Save all your documents and files to Live Mesh and then wherever you are, whether it’s at work, home or just at the local internet café, you can have access to the latest versions of your documents then and there via the power of the internet.
5.      Portable Apps – If you’ve got a big old hard disk in your notebook or netbook, then you probably don’t care about a few hundred megabytes here and there. But, if you’re struggling to get by on the handful of gigabytes offered by a tiny SSD then there is hope. Head on over to the Portable Apps website and you can download a range of free software which has been tweaked to run directly from a USB flash drive or memory card. Mozilla FireFox, Pidgin, VLC Media Player, 7-Zip, FileZilla and OpenOffice.org 3.0 are just a few amongst the many free software packages on offer.
6.      Avira AntiVir Personal  – When it comes to Anti-virus software, Avira’s AntiVir Personal is by far the best of the freebies. It does a good job of stopping all kinds of malware in its tracks, and isn’t too far off the protection of commercial products. The only niggle is the software’s insistence on nagging you to upgrade every time you download updated virus definitions - that’s just the price you’ll have to pay for being such a freeloading cheapskate.Â
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Tags: avira, Chrome, Google, laptop, Live Mesh, netbook, OpenOffice, vlc
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December 26th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Erm, spam comment? :-S
I agree with most of the article. VLC is excellent and I have OO.o on my machines - although I keep MS Office on them as well, as I find OO.o is still lacking in some areas; especially importing/exporting MS Office documents.
AntiVir is also great, although I would recommend upgrading to the paid for version, as the updates are more frequent and in the last c’t test, the paid for version also detected significantly more viruses than the free version!
I think Google Chrome is down to taste, and it isn’t mine - especially as it seems to randomly give up rendering pages half way through (especially background colours). This is a bug that the original version of Safari for Windows also suffered from, but seems to have been fixed, so I’m guessing the problem is that Google are still using that old version of WebKit. They really need to think about moving to the fixed, later versions of WebKit…
December 26th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Interesting article, but you don’t say from where you can obtain the “fine toothcomb” mentioned in paragraph 2.
I shall be very disappointed if it turns out to be a “fine-tooth comb”…
December 26th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I would tend to disagree with the use of Chrome as a browser, Firefox has much more going for it, Adblock, flash block, and the ability to make pictues larges or smaller. Chrome is lacking these things.
Also Avira does not compare to AVG which is also free and works better and less obtrusive with ads. Also when I removed Avira, it left some residue on the computer which seems to spring up at strange times.
Audacity is Great! should be mentioned.
December 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
AVG has had a rough ride lately: the upgrade from the 7.x platform to 8.x “in the field” was very disappointing, with machines slowing to a crawl and some infections just strolling right in. A fresh blank install of 8 is way, way better than an updated 7.x > 8.x, but to get best results you have to rip 7.x right off, run ccleaner, reboot, then put on 8.x
I have a down on OpenOffice. I used to recommend it fairly freely, until former Word users started bugging me about things like ways to work with styles & default fonts. Then things got difficult 8(
December 26th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Hi
Having had a nice new laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pro) for Christmas I was disgusted with the amount of cr@pward pre-installed. There were Google Toolbars and the desktop littered with links to Amazon, Ebay and others. The system tray had dozens of icons showing a myriad of “value added” programs that resulted in the laptop grinding and groaning on each boot up.
Soon sorted using this method http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=144783 and a copy of the Windows Visa install disc. You can get hold of clean install media from Microsoft for a handling charge
or alternatively download it via a torrent, you can get the original Vista SP1 media images using information posted at http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/03/download-windows-vista-with-service-pack-1-sp1-integrated-slipstream-x86-english-dvd-image-official-msdn-version-with-torrent/ . Note this is not a cracked illegal version, just a copy of the original Vista setup media to install a clean version of Windows Vista back on to your laptop that you do own a valid license for. Using the method in the first link you can validate the clean install back to same OEM license without needing to contact Microsoft.
Hope that helps.
December 27th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Please be VERY careful with this suggestion: there are Vista licences that won’t allow you to re-use them in this way; and you will only find out when it’s too late. Not something you can try easily, unless you have spare hard drives or a copy of Acronis or Paragon’s partition backup…
I’m now coming across an era of PCs which are marked as XP compatible, but in fact are only buildable with their own original restore media. An HP DX2250 has an Athlon CPU and AMD/ATi chips throughout: the original retail CD of XP won’t load on it.
December 28th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Hi Steve
A good warning.
All laptops though with a Vista licence will come with restore discs or will have the option to create restore media to allow resetting the laptop back to factory defaults with the original OEM install of Vista. I’m assuming those that follow this tip will have this media to hand, and will have taken backups of any user data.
Vista OEM on laptops should work fine with the tool provided to take a backup of the OEM license key. Vista install media is new enough to contain the necessary drivers for current hardware to allow it to install, although some hunting on the manufacturers website will be required for updated drivers as the info on the link mentions.
I think your XP compatible laptops are just suffering from old XP install media that doesn’t contain the drivers to allow it to boot into text mode. Getting the necessary drivers and using NLite to slip stream them in should resolve that problem. This is a particular issue at the moment with SATA equiped PCs and trying to install XP. You either need to switch the SATA interface to compatible mode (via the BIOS) or use NLite to slip stream in the SATA drivers from Intel (Intel Matrix Storage) to allow it to boot up into Text mode to then go onto installing Windows XP proper.
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