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Moneysaving PC Setups
Aliktren
Posts: 306 Forumite
I've recently been running a personal project to get rid of all the surplus software and junk on my home PCs and laptops, as well as removing all of the *cough* borrowed *cough* software that was sat around acquired over the years but not really used.
I thought I'd just post up my experiences here as they may help and seemed to be in the spirit of the site as a major goal was for it to be free/save money
I had two goals when I started out - Improve the physical and logical security of all our computers and peripherals and replace as much paid or commercial software with open source equivalents or add functionality by adding open source.
This wasn't going to include the operating systems, I have used Linux and it's just not for me, I play a lot of games and my wife is finally used to Windows and Vista so moving would have been a lot of effort for little return, (for those reading this screaming "install linux!! in their head - it's going on a flash drive for experimentation, m'kay ?)
Also everyone has there own preferences, the ones listed here are not recommendations, they are just what I choose either because they were free or because they worked for me and I liked them but I offer them up as options.
1) Doing the basic things well.
Firstly, are you sure your wireless is secure.??
A lot of people saw the Watchdog article recently and it certainly spurred me to check our router config.
I rarely use a webcafe but I do understand the risks when doing so (everything you do is in the clear and interceptable unless you are using VPN, and possibly even then)
So, a quick router healthcheck.
a) Make sure you have change the default admin password,
b) Make sure remote admin is off
c) Check the Security
Mine is a Netgear and the security I am using is : WPA2-PSK
You don't have to understand what this is but you do need to know this is probably the best security afforded by your home router but for the curious the inevitable wikipedia link :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access
If you use the lesser WPA standard I can come along and crack it, really quickly, so don't use it, the tools to crack it are free and freely available, be paranoid on this one.
d) Finally don't use a short password, the recommendation would be 20 characters but that can be a problem to remember without writing it down or having to store it
, thus negating the point, but try and make the password long, a mix of letters and numbers.
2) Clean House
Start by going into Windows Control Panel, Installed programs, and uninstall anything you haven't used for six months, game installs, utilities, stuff you never use
For anything you are not sure on what it is try a google search - I found windows live had installed quite a lot of stuff just on it's own after some checking on why I had , so that all went.
One you are fairly happy this is done then you can move on to tidying up the machine.
There are several utilities that you can use that are free for this.
I personally like Glary Utilities, it's virtually a clone of tuneup but a free version is available which is good enough
http://www.glaryutilities.com/
Once installed I ran the disk cleaner
Run the registry cleaner several times until it comes back with no errors
Now run the startup manager tool and check, I really hate Itunes or really anything clogging up my startup but your mileage may vary, for me I chucked out pretty much everything I could
The list I ended up with was :
Mouse Driver (I have a razer Krait)
VirtualCloneDrive (allows me to mount ISO images as drives)
SUN Java (this is a PITA but JAVA is a security risk so make sure you're getting updates)
IM
Truecrypt (more on this later)
Dropbox (and this)
I found my machine was absolutely fine like this, no motherboard bits and bobs, or NVIDIA doodads, everything works OK without them (in Windows 7 anyway)
You can also run Disk Defragmenter and Disk Checks, and then have a look round yourself on your drives and clear out anything you don't need.
3) Put it back together
As part if the uninstall I had removed my office suite, mail client , IM client, drawing package, ZIP package, PDF reader.
The goal was to put all these back but make sure I was using open source.
Your list might vary but what I settled on was :
Office – Openoffice
Totally free from Sun Microsystems and looks very much like Office 2003, you can import and export documents in MS format, save as PDF and choose the bits you wont, you also dont get 30 things you didn't really need unlike some packages we could mention......
http://www.openoffice.org/
A did a minimal install with text, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing, thats all I'm likely to ever use.
IM
Windows LIVE is brilliant, IMO, but it does that annoying thing of taking over your system, I was getting popups every time I started it asking for me to configure my headphones!!, it has advertisments that expand if keyed over and a bunch of tabs I will never ever use.
After trying a few alternatives I settled on Pidgin
http://www.pidgin.im/
this allowed me to use my hotmail IM, and also add facebook messaging which was pretty neat.
I did try a few of the many alternatives for Pidgin, but I liked the look of Pidgin
Graphics
I do an amount of photo editing so I needed a photoshop that didn't cost £600 or whatever. The natural choice was GIMP, haven't had time to play with it much but it seems great and you can even make it look like photoshop if you are used to using that at work.
http://www.gimp.org/
Browser/Mail/Schedule
Ahh Mozilla, how I love thee..
http://www.mozilla.org/
I use firefox anyway, and as a browser of choice it will be clawed from my cold dead hands before I use anything else... I love it.
There is a lot you can do to Firefox though to make it more secure.
a) – Go to the security tab (tools/options/security)
Click use master password and then enter one, this should be your bare minimum of password management as this means if someone nicks your PC or borrows your session they will have to enter a password to see the list of passwords for your amazon account that are otherwise held in the open (!)
b) Addons -
These are my regulars :
Adblock - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
NoScript - http://noscript.net/
With these two you are saved from ads on most sites and if you use noscript properly, are saved from having virtually anything happen on a site without you saying it's ok – not much use most of the time but very handy if you are searching for something or otherwise skiing off piste.
There are a few others like cookie culler, but the two above are what I always install.
A quick shoutout as well for WEAVE which I hadn't come across before but is a nice browser sync tool from Mozilla that will become a must have when out of beta. - https://mozillalabs.com/weave/
Thunderbird
I havent used thunderbird before and the first thing it did was MOVE all my hotmail for the last two years off the internet and onto my laptop, this is avoidable, once you know how, but was very frustraing when it happened. Once working though this is a nice email package, and you can add lightning or sunbird which allow you to sync calendars with Google calendars or others - I set this up so my wife and I have one common view of one google calendar so we can coordinate birthdays and going out
PDF
I uninstalled Adobe Reader and installed Sumatra, which is open source and fast :
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
and finally for Zips :
http://www.7-zip.org/
4) Hitting Paranoia Mode
The final step has been to use truecrypt to encrypt my system partition and all my USB disks.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Only do this if you understand what you are getting into, a disk once encrypted is a brick if you forget the password, but the advantage is if someone nicks your PC when they break in, or walks off with your laptop, all your documents, online banking details sitting in cookies, etc, etc are almost certainly inaccessible to the thief, unless they are really really determined (i.e. not a casual thief)
Truecrypt is also free, has good documentation, and worked for me first time without any issue, on Windows 7
5)
Honorable mentions
I discovered several cools tools on my voyage but will shout out for a couple
Dropbox – gives you a bit of space online that can be accessed easily from your PC – and therefore from another PC if you are visting friends, etc, can be used to store pictures, or whatever you need, not quite like having a 2gb memory stick, but maybe better in some ways as you cant forget it
https://www.dropbox.com/home#/
Open ttd – a free open source version of one of my all time fav games, great for whiling away the hours on a long train journey or something.
http://www.openttd.org/en/
So end result is a street legal, secure, fast, clean PC with no crud, lots of nice utilities and software and a better understanding of security than when I started, so it worked for me
I hope this helps someone
If you have suggestions or alternatives or questions go ahead and post them up
I thought I'd just post up my experiences here as they may help and seemed to be in the spirit of the site as a major goal was for it to be free/save money
I had two goals when I started out - Improve the physical and logical security of all our computers and peripherals and replace as much paid or commercial software with open source equivalents or add functionality by adding open source.
This wasn't going to include the operating systems, I have used Linux and it's just not for me, I play a lot of games and my wife is finally used to Windows and Vista so moving would have been a lot of effort for little return, (for those reading this screaming "install linux!! in their head - it's going on a flash drive for experimentation, m'kay ?)
Also everyone has there own preferences, the ones listed here are not recommendations, they are just what I choose either because they were free or because they worked for me and I liked them but I offer them up as options.
1) Doing the basic things well.
Firstly, are you sure your wireless is secure.??
A lot of people saw the Watchdog article recently and it certainly spurred me to check our router config.
I rarely use a webcafe but I do understand the risks when doing so (everything you do is in the clear and interceptable unless you are using VPN, and possibly even then)
So, a quick router healthcheck.
a) Make sure you have change the default admin password,
b) Make sure remote admin is off
c) Check the Security
Mine is a Netgear and the security I am using is : WPA2-PSK
You don't have to understand what this is but you do need to know this is probably the best security afforded by your home router but for the curious the inevitable wikipedia link :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access
If you use the lesser WPA standard I can come along and crack it, really quickly, so don't use it, the tools to crack it are free and freely available, be paranoid on this one.
d) Finally don't use a short password, the recommendation would be 20 characters but that can be a problem to remember without writing it down or having to store it
, thus negating the point, but try and make the password long, a mix of letters and numbers.
2) Clean House
Start by going into Windows Control Panel, Installed programs, and uninstall anything you haven't used for six months, game installs, utilities, stuff you never use
For anything you are not sure on what it is try a google search - I found windows live had installed quite a lot of stuff just on it's own after some checking on why I had , so that all went.
One you are fairly happy this is done then you can move on to tidying up the machine.
There are several utilities that you can use that are free for this.
I personally like Glary Utilities, it's virtually a clone of tuneup but a free version is available which is good enough
http://www.glaryutilities.com/
Once installed I ran the disk cleaner
Run the registry cleaner several times until it comes back with no errors
Now run the startup manager tool and check, I really hate Itunes or really anything clogging up my startup but your mileage may vary, for me I chucked out pretty much everything I could
The list I ended up with was :
Mouse Driver (I have a razer Krait)
VirtualCloneDrive (allows me to mount ISO images as drives)
SUN Java (this is a PITA but JAVA is a security risk so make sure you're getting updates)
IM
Truecrypt (more on this later)
Dropbox (and this)
I found my machine was absolutely fine like this, no motherboard bits and bobs, or NVIDIA doodads, everything works OK without them (in Windows 7 anyway)
You can also run Disk Defragmenter and Disk Checks, and then have a look round yourself on your drives and clear out anything you don't need.
3) Put it back together
As part if the uninstall I had removed my office suite, mail client , IM client, drawing package, ZIP package, PDF reader.
The goal was to put all these back but make sure I was using open source.
Your list might vary but what I settled on was :
Office – Openoffice
Totally free from Sun Microsystems and looks very much like Office 2003, you can import and export documents in MS format, save as PDF and choose the bits you wont, you also dont get 30 things you didn't really need unlike some packages we could mention......
http://www.openoffice.org/
A did a minimal install with text, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing, thats all I'm likely to ever use.
IM
Windows LIVE is brilliant, IMO, but it does that annoying thing of taking over your system, I was getting popups every time I started it asking for me to configure my headphones!!, it has advertisments that expand if keyed over and a bunch of tabs I will never ever use.
After trying a few alternatives I settled on Pidgin
http://www.pidgin.im/
this allowed me to use my hotmail IM, and also add facebook messaging which was pretty neat.
I did try a few of the many alternatives for Pidgin, but I liked the look of Pidgin
Graphics
I do an amount of photo editing so I needed a photoshop that didn't cost £600 or whatever. The natural choice was GIMP, haven't had time to play with it much but it seems great and you can even make it look like photoshop if you are used to using that at work.
http://www.gimp.org/
Browser/Mail/Schedule
Ahh Mozilla, how I love thee..
http://www.mozilla.org/
I use firefox anyway, and as a browser of choice it will be clawed from my cold dead hands before I use anything else... I love it.
There is a lot you can do to Firefox though to make it more secure.
a) – Go to the security tab (tools/options/security)
Click use master password and then enter one, this should be your bare minimum of password management as this means if someone nicks your PC or borrows your session they will have to enter a password to see the list of passwords for your amazon account that are otherwise held in the open (!)
b) Addons -
These are my regulars :
Adblock - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
NoScript - http://noscript.net/
With these two you are saved from ads on most sites and if you use noscript properly, are saved from having virtually anything happen on a site without you saying it's ok – not much use most of the time but very handy if you are searching for something or otherwise skiing off piste.
There are a few others like cookie culler, but the two above are what I always install.
A quick shoutout as well for WEAVE which I hadn't come across before but is a nice browser sync tool from Mozilla that will become a must have when out of beta. - https://mozillalabs.com/weave/
Thunderbird
I havent used thunderbird before and the first thing it did was MOVE all my hotmail for the last two years off the internet and onto my laptop, this is avoidable, once you know how, but was very frustraing when it happened. Once working though this is a nice email package, and you can add lightning or sunbird which allow you to sync calendars with Google calendars or others - I set this up so my wife and I have one common view of one google calendar so we can coordinate birthdays and going out
I uninstalled Adobe Reader and installed Sumatra, which is open source and fast :
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
and finally for Zips :
http://www.7-zip.org/
4) Hitting Paranoia Mode
The final step has been to use truecrypt to encrypt my system partition and all my USB disks.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Only do this if you understand what you are getting into, a disk once encrypted is a brick if you forget the password, but the advantage is if someone nicks your PC when they break in, or walks off with your laptop, all your documents, online banking details sitting in cookies, etc, etc are almost certainly inaccessible to the thief, unless they are really really determined (i.e. not a casual thief)
Truecrypt is also free, has good documentation, and worked for me first time without any issue, on Windows 7
5)
Honorable mentions
I discovered several cools tools on my voyage but will shout out for a couple
Dropbox – gives you a bit of space online that can be accessed easily from your PC – and therefore from another PC if you are visting friends, etc, can be used to store pictures, or whatever you need, not quite like having a 2gb memory stick, but maybe better in some ways as you cant forget it
https://www.dropbox.com/home#/
Open ttd – a free open source version of one of my all time fav games, great for whiling away the hours on a long train journey or something.
http://www.openttd.org/en/
So end result is a street legal, secure, fast, clean PC with no crud, lots of nice utilities and software and a better understanding of security than when I started, so it worked for me
I hope this helps someone
If you have suggestions or alternatives or questions go ahead and post them up
0
Comments
-
Theres a website, which for the life of me I can't remember, that would hold all the useful program installers, so upon a reinstallation you could install all your useful programs in a sort of windows update type fashion... Gimme a minute.
Edit - Found it!
http://ninite.com/0 -
Awesome, thanks for that! - great link0
-
This is my useful software list :
Imaging / basic editing :
irfanview - http://www.irfanview.net/
Audio / Video playback :
Winamp - http://www.winamp.com/
VideoLAN - http://wiki.videolan.org/Main_Page
Audio editor / recorder
Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Backup of DVD's to play on netbook
DVDSmith - http://www.dvdsmith.com/
Simple text editor
SciTE - http://www.scintilla.org
PDF Writer
Cute PDF - http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp
System Managment / reporter
Belarc Advisor - http://www.belarc.com0 -
Great info!
Thanks guys2.22kWp Solar PV system installed Oct 2010, Fronius IG20 Inverter, south facing (-5 deg), 30 degree pitch, no shadingEverything will be alright in the end so, if it’s not yet alright, it means it’s not yet the endMFW #4 OPs: 2018 £866.89, 2019 £1322.33, 2020 £1337.07
2021 £1250.00, 2022 £1500.00, 2023 £1500, 2024 £13502025 target = £1200, YTD £9190
Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur0 -
Wrong. WPA extremely secure. It is WEP that isn't.If you use the lesser WPA standard I can come along and crack it, really quickly, so don't use it, the tools to crack it are free and freely available, be paranoid on this one.
Why? It is sitting there doing nothing. It isn't slowing the computer down at all. If you're short on space, fine but otherwise there's no need to.2) Clean House
Start by going into Windows Control Panel, Installed programs, and uninstall anything you haven't used for six months, game installs, utilities, stuff you never use
NEVER EVER EVER RUN A REGISTRY CLEANER UNLESS:Run the registry cleaner several times until it comes back with no errors
a) You have a problem
b) You have a clue what you're doing, know what is safe to alter and know how to roll back any changes.
Install IOBits Smartdefrag. Works as good as Diskeeper but is free.
You can also run Disk Defragmenter and Disk Checks, and then have a look round yourself on your drives and clear out anything you don't need.
Note that Pidgin doesn't support webcams.IM
After trying a few alternatives I settled on Pidgin
http://www.pidgin.im/
this allowed me to use my hotmail IM, and also add facebook messaging which was pretty neat.
GIMP has a rubbish user interface. TRy Paint.NET instead.Graphics
I do an amount of photo editing so I needed a photoshop that didn't cost £600 or whatever. The natural choice was GIMP, haven't had time to play with it much but it seems great and you can even make it look like photoshop if you are used to using that at work.
http://www.gimp.org/
Foxit PDF reader is far better.PDF
I uninstalled Adobe Reader and installed Sumatra, which is open source and fast :
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/index.html
Use J-Zip instead. It is built on 7-Zip but has a user interface similar to Winzip.0 -
OP: Nice post.
:beer:Excellent post!:beer:0 -
why quote the whole first post again when its only 6 posts back ??Ex forum ambassador
Long term forum member0 -
no problem ....made the thread a nightmare to read....lolEx forum ambassador
Long term forum member0
Please don't ban me:beer:
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