Introduction

Alright, Windows 7 was installed. Now it was time to setup the programs. These are the programs I deem mandatory for Windows as I use it:

Firefox
Chrome
PDF reader
Flash Player
F.lux
Keepass
Open Office
Windows Messenger
Skype
Flashfxp
Photoshop
Media Player Classic & K-Lite Codec Pack
Winamp
Daemon Tools
uTorrent

Firefox, Flash Player and PDF reader

Installing Firefox was no problem. The allow prompt has transfered over from Vista to 7 but I can live with it. It was after installation that the problems reared their ugly heads.

1. I am not sure in what Firefox version the ever active spell checking was implemented but the shit was, without mistake, on in version 3.6.12. Red and annoying wavy lines under 75% of my words in any text fields I graced with my writing. This is not because I am iliterate. Its because I am multilingual and installed Firefox in swedish. To get rid of this shit I had to as follows:

• Type in About:config in the firefox address bar and confirm that I know what I am doing when prompted.
• Right clicking in the listed config window and selecting New and then Integer
• Entering ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle and then integer value 0

2. The next problem was and still is that ctr+f no longer triggers the search prompt at every attempt. It is probably related to what kind of page I am browsing but I never noticed this problem before.

3. Installing Adobe flash player and adobe reader. OMFG. First I have to install Adobe download manager and at the same time uncheck the fucking checkboxes for installing Google toolbar and Mcafee virus scan (depending on how I entered get.adobe.com). Before I could install it I must deactivate my antivirus. Upon completion of that senseless task, Firefox had to be restarted and upon restart the Flash player and Reader would still not install! They installed just fine in Internet Explorer though. I think this is the symptom of the ongoing war between the software giants. Somehow I magically managed to install the flash player when being prompted for the module at a third party website. Staying the hell away from get.adobe.com seems to help. Still no luck with the Reader though. Adobe has become something akin to the evil old Real Player. I am gonna go for an open source pdf reader from now on.

F.lux

F.lux must be one of the best softwares to come out in recent years. Everyone should have it. In the evening, it changes the color of the screen to a pinker and warmer one, and this truly helps you sleep. Instead of staring into an intense blue light that tells the brain its day and no time for sleeping, you stare into an evening sky and the body shifts over to relaxation mode and gets ready for sleep. No more insomnia from too much time spent infront of computer. Awesome program based on a technology that apparantly is in the process of getting patented.

Keepass

An open source software that lets you store your passwords and other sensitive information in an encrypted and password protected database. I am not gonna let my logins get compromised again so this will come in handy. Everyone should have it.

Open Office

No problems with installation. I have had two issues with Open Office before.

1. Locating the side scroll bar in the spread sheet environment. I think it was hidden/compressed by default in an older version of Open Office but as of version 3.2.0 the side scroll bar seem to be visible by default.

2. Saving a spread sheet as tab denominated .csv file and using it for PayPal masspay. I failed once again with this upon my initial try. It seemed to merge two cells with eachother. Upon saving a second time in the exact same manner, the cells were kept intact though. And PayPal managed to read the file. Problem solved?

Windows Messenger and Outlook Express

Turns out its Windows Live Mail and Live Messenger that you are supposed to use these days. They come integrated. I had a few problems with them though.

1. It is not intuitive how to change your status in Live Messenger. The old standard, which Microsoft has deviated from, was to right click the activity and change status. You can no longer do this. Now you must hoover over the activity and change status. I don’t mind the new option, I just don’t see why they removed the old one that is universal in all chatting software.

2. Finding the toolbar in Live Mail was nearly impossible. There is no text menu available for it. The Live Mail interface is remniscient of the “new” Microsoft Office interface. You can off the bat find hundreds of menus and functions you never use but not not a single one that you do use. It is so retarded that I won’t waste any more words on it. Finally I found what I was looking for by clicking the icon accompanied by the down arrow in the top left corner of the screen and then selecting Alternatives.

3. Windows Live Mail bakes together emails with the same subject and although useful at times, I would like to see an easily accessible icon for toggling back to the old school style. There might be one, it just is not accessible and I sure as hell have not found it yet.

Skype

Installation went fine. It just pisses me off that I have to login to skype.com before I can download it. One problem with the actual program though. With my initial Realtek High Definition Audio drivers running, Skype found two microphones and chose the wrong one so it had to be changed manually. Unfortunately the microphone was turned off in the sound card settings and upon turning it on a lot of noise came out of the speakers. To work around this I updated the Acer drivers to the Vista Windows 7 R253 drivers. That, in turn, required the locating and downloaded of a zipped driver file because the standard .exe just would not install due to supposed compatibility issues. After that the noise disappeared and the microphone seemed to work. However, the sound level in Skype was and is still way to low if any other application using sound is running at the same time or has been running while Skype was on. To work around this the other application must be closed and Skype must be restarted.

Flashfxp

Arguably the best ftp-program there is. I was not gonna take any chances this time around though so I downloaded it from the official site and installed as trial. I will probably buy it once the trial expires. Heck, it’s only 30 bucks.

Photoshop

Without photoshop you are seriously handicapped so this had to be sorted. I installed the CS5 version 12 edition as trial and as for the rest – well, let’s just say I am not gonna dish out 1500 dollars for a program that I am not using professionally.

Media Player Classic & K-Lite Codec Pack

These two come in one package. I downloaded the standard version this time around. I think it’s awesome. Pretty much all movie format works. No problems whatsoever.

Winamp

An old classic. I have a lot of music that does not contain enough information or are in too weird formats for them to be accessible in interfaces like iTunes and thus I still prefer manually browsing for music in explorer. And this is where Winamp comes in handy. On top of that it is easy to use and plugins for .mpc, .ape and various other music formats are easily installed.

Daemon Tools

I remember the days when this was a simple and effective little program that anyone could download and use indefinitely. Well, no more. Now you have to download some overfeatured shit from the official site and start paying for it after the trial period has run out. I am quite sure that the Daemon Tools installation installed Tages Protection as well which fortunately is incompatible with Windows 7. However, this could be the doing of some old games I installed, namely Witcher and Sybiera. Hard to tell at this point.

uTorrent

Best torrent client there is. In Windows Vista I had some serious problems updating it to newer versions using the integrated update function but it seems to work just fine in Windows 7. The only issue I have had with uTorrent in Windows 7 is the interference caused by Kaspersky Internet Security. Until I deactivated Kaspersky, my downloads kept getting interupted with the following error message:

The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user-mapped section open

Of course the message was in spanish and uTorrent does not let me copy error messages (wtf?) so I had to eye-copy it letter by letter before I could translate it. Antway, to fix the problem, I first unchecked the “allow Windows to index” option for the folder where the torrents are stored – a recommended fix posted on the uTorrent forums – but I don’t think it made any difference because it did not start working until I disabled Kaspersky.

Web Money Keeper Light

I like the Web Money system and I am an ardent supporter of virtual currencies and fast/cheap international money transfer systems. Nothing is more effective when it comes to taking power away from the state and returning it to the individual than a currency and payment system that the state does not regulate. The Web Money Keeper Light client stores your login credentials in an encrypted and password protected file. Good stuff. I wish PayPal could be like this. A nice and secure client with no bullshit instead of a shitty web interface and constant freezing of accounts due to access from ip-addresses other than the original one. We are living in the 21st century, not the 10th century. People move around and Internet is accessible worldwide! PayPal just does not get it. PayPal is a system made for morons that can’t do anything on their computers except start Internet Explorer and login to Hotmail/Messenger/Facebook. Web Money, on the other hand, owns. Just wish there were more agents selling Web Money.

What about anti-virus?

Fuck anti-virus. It just bogs down the computer and interferes too much with whatever you are doing. If you are sitting on a wired network behind a modern password protected router with updated firmware, and you keep your operative system up to date, and refrain from opening virus containing emails or downloading your software from Piratebay and the like, while at the same time not giving out any logins you may have to your friends, you will be perfectly fine.

1.5 years ago, when I lived in Spain, I had the bad judgement to buy an expensive shitty Acer Aspire 8730G laptop with a spanish Windows Vista pre-installed. Not knowing a word of spanish and changing from XP to Windows Vista at the same time was a cluster fuck. The worst things with Windows vista is the constant allow prompts that keep popping out as soon as you want to do something. The system messages and error messages also suck ass because you can’t copy a fucking letter from them and google for resolution. You must eye-copy everything that gets thrown in your face. Especially frustrating when it’s all in spanish.

Anyhow, I slowly started to cope with Vista and picked up the essentials in spanish: Instalar, desinstalar, bloquar, desbloquar, apagar, reiniciar and so on. There was one problem though, or actually a few problems. When playing music in any player and surfing at the same time, the sound would occassionally crackle. Obviously a driver issue. I googled and found others with similar problems who apparantly solved them by disabling their wireless network card. Well it did not do anything for me. In addition, I tried all drivers I could find for both the wireless card and my Realtek High Definition Audio soundcard. I even went through the hell of updating my NVidia Geforce 9600 GT driver to Nvidias reference driver, which by no means is straight forward on a spanish vista, and that did not do shit either. The sound still crackled. Furthermore, I had another problem which persisted. The top of the screen would flicker when watching movie scenes where the camera was panning. Nothing I could do about it – Acer Aspire 8730G was and still is a shitty laptop that no drivers can fix.

Anyway, I ordered a cheap Windows 7 upgrade back then and let it lie for fear of using it and having to install all programs from scratch again. Then came present time and a gift from a former business associate of mine. We happen to share a great deal of hosting accounts and about 2 weeks ago it was brought to our attention that evil files were being uploaded to the ftp accounts we were using. As it turned out, my business associate had gotten his Flashfxp compromised, in fact, it no longer worked at all, and most data within had been leaked. Before that became apparant, I ran both AVG and Kaspersky Internet Security on my computer and though they did find a few things, they found nothing that could have done it. Kaspersky is a weird software btw. If you have scene releases in rar format on your harddisk the program simply keeps scanning them forever. I left it on over night and it was not done after 18 fucking hours. Kaspersky can’t cope with rar files, especially not scene rar files.

After that I ran the Windows 7 upgrade which involved 2 different cds. One with Acer bullshit on it and one with Windows on it. The full installation involved three retarded steps: 1 – Acer Cd; 2 – Windows cd; 3 – Back to Acer CD. The installation program did not let me format c, however, it did let me make a new installation, which I did. In the process, the old windows folder was renamed to windows.old. After the installation was done I had to manually delete the windows.old folder and that was brutal. I could not delete the folder from the root. The deletion process just never finised. I had to venture into the subfolders and delete them one by one. And then delete the windows.old folder in the root. I deleted all installed programs as well, a much bigger folder by any measure, and that only took one command and a few minutes in total. You go figure. Finally I installed the drivers and application data on the Acer cd and that was that.

Of course, my new Windows 7 was in spanish as well and the annoying allow prompts were still there. Likewise, it is still impossible to copy the damn system messages and error messages. I do like the new windows task bar though. Just drag any program down there, right click it and pin it. And the old tool bar can easily be brought back as well. Just right click on the blue bar at bottom of screen, select Tool Bars and then add a new one, name it what you want, create and select a folder to store the data in and that’s it. Just drag down the type of stuff you want to have there. Especially useful for documents in which you store your notes on a daily basis.

First thing I did was to install Winamp and Firefox. And guess what? sound still crackled every now and then. Fucking shit. On top of that I could not turn on the microphone because when it was on, a great deal of noise was on as well. I got some movies running as well and guess what? top of screen still flickered when camera was panning. I updated the sound driver from Acers bullshit to:

Realtek Semiconductor Corp. High Definition Audio System Software Ver: R2.53

This seemed to resolve the microphone issue (and most of the flickering as well?) but the crackling was still there and still is. So much for the Acer Aspire 8730G. G stands for Gofuckyourself.

Lesson is learned though. I am never gonna buy an expensive laptop again. It will be a desktop for games, movies and music in the future, that’s for sure. I mean come on, a laptop with 5.1 sound and 1080p that crackles, flickers and lags regardless of drivers. Even Jesus Christ would be pissed off at that.

Next up is the rundown on software needed for the new Windows installation.