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[side_show]

Hi kids!

After much heartache, my old pc has finally gone into retirement - it's not dead, but it's so full I can't even defragment it.  We went out and got our sexy new system today.  So here I sit - my first new system in 10 years!  We've decided she's a girl and named her Agnes. 

As most of you know I hardly know anything at all about the whole deal so first let me tell you what I have & what I want - maybe some of your brilliant minds can tell me how to make it all work!

What I've got:

hp pavilion a1730n

running Windows Vista (am I the only one here on Vista right now?  I am afeared of the patches and problems...)

AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core processor 4600+
2048 MB PC2-4200 DDR2  SDRAM memory
320GB 7200RPM serial ATA hard drive

HP pocket Media Drive bay (what is this?  is this for the plugging in of an external harddrive?)


What I want:

BitTorrent
Virus protection of the best order (I'm on the 60 day trail of Norton Anti-virus right now...)
AdAware & Spybots
The newest possible version of Office - I've got a copy of 97 with the CD key - is there a way to actually obtain newer versions fo' free, or do security measures make it impossible?

Where does one go to safely do this?  I don't want to expose Agnes to anything painful so early on in her life!

The thing I am most looking forward to doing is ripping CD's, especially getting caught up on previous seasons of shows I got into later, and also perhaps finally doing a CD swap with some of you party people, so any suggestions in this regard are totally welcome.


(Also, touambie never looked so lovely as it does on our nifty new LCD monitor! - so twinkly!)

[jough]

First of all, welcome to the 21st century, Smells.  That sounds like a very nice machine on which to run Vista.  That 2Gb of memory will come in handy.  Do you know what kind of video card you have?  Are you able to see all the pretty transparencies and stuff in Vista?

Anyway, you should be fine.  Vista is basically like XP, but a little prettier and more secure (they pretty much stopped working on XP security for the past year so they could claim that Vista was so much more secure).

Here are my suggestions for software.  They are by no means the only choices, but they're either what *I* use or what I'd recommend to someone else to use (like, I use some weird apps for some things, because I'm a geek).

Dinner is almost ready to eat so I won't link these up right now.  Maybe later.  You can always Googe them.  EDIT: Links added where appropriate.

Bittorrent: gotta go with micro torrent (uTorrent).

Virus protection: anything but Norton.  I use nothing but I don't download executable/program files on this machine.  I think I have some freeware thing on my internet box, but it's Linux so it won't help you.

Adware: gotta use more than one.  Get Spybot Search & Destroy for sure, then maybe... on, what was that other one?  Adaware?  Something like that.  Cort would know.

Get Office 2003 for now.  2007 isn't ripe yet.

Or get OpenOffice, which is free, and not as good, but it does read and write common office documents.

For ripping CDs, I recommend Audiograbber.  It's easier to use than EAC (which most will recommend) and if you install the LAME codec it's just as good.

I'd also recommend Mozilla FireFox for browsing, and Thunderbird rather than Outlook Express for email.

Also, if you can't afford Photoshop, or don't know anyone who can buy a copy for you (wink wink) then try GIMP - it's almost as good, and it's free.  It's more Photoshop than most people will ever need.

Download Google's free Picasa to organize your photos.  It's really good.  I'm using it myself.

I'll try to think of some other "must have" apps...

Again, congrats. I'm sure you'll be happy with a nice modern working computer.  It'll make every computing task easier.

[slink]

Absolutely everything Jough said. Every single point he said exactly what I would.

Oh, if you download the Photoshop CS3 Beta, which you can do from their site, if you rename "application.sif" to something else, in the program files/adobe/photoshop cs3/amt/ folder, it won't bug you to pay or insist anything. Then if it craps out all you have to do is rename it back to the .sif and then rename it again, i.e. to application.sif.rename, so the software can't find it.

[Lister]

Jough has some good advice there.  OpenOffice.org is a pretty decent piece of software, I've found, and it's only like 60 megs to download.  There is a "home and student" version of Office 07 for sale for $160ish right now, but that's still more than I would pay for it, especially since owning Office doesn't make me money or give me enjoyment.

If your HP is like mine, the Pocket Media Drive Bay is a fancy way of saying it has slots for all kinds of portable memory cards such as you might find in a digital camera or music player.  It'll be a convenience if you have devices that use those cards and you want to transfer files easily.

Like Jough, I don't use an antivirus product.  This is not something I recommend to others.  I also hate Norton, because in its quest to be user friendly it has decided not to tell the user anything about what it is doing or when it wants to do it, or indeed give the user the ability to change any of that.  My Mom uses MacAffee or McAffee or whatever, and I don't get any calls about it so it's probably easy to use if nothing else.

[jough]

Seriously, I really know what I'm doing and am very careful about what I download and install.  I tend to only get things from trusted sources and scan things at least once, plus I have Spybot's TeaTimer and other daemons running on my PC.  I had to not install McAfee because it was just hitting my hard drive constantly.  Norton is an evil I wouldn't inflict on anyone.

Anyway, someone here once recommend a freebie virus scan.  Avast?  That sounds right.  Maybe check download.com and see what's recommended. 

[Doc]

Again: Yes to everything Jough said.

Adaware is a good product which can be found at Lavasoft.de.
I didn't use a virus scanner for ages, mainly because the ones I tried bogged my computer down to unacceptable levels but I currently use avast and am very happy with it. It's free to individuals and makes you feel like a virus free pirate. You can't get better value than that.

Damnit, Jough got in with my only original suggestion because I let my post sit here for five minutes without posting. Such is the world of online advice-giving.

[jaydub]

I turn everyone I know onto Grisoft's AVG Anti-virus.  My services as family tech support haven't included repairing virus related stuff ever since I began doing that.

[KeithHernandez]

AVG is my prefered anti-virus program.

(that is, until an hour ago when I picked up this pretty little mac book and had it all up and running in minutes.)

[side_show]

AVG is my prefered anti-virus program.

(that is, until an hour ago when I picked up this pretty little mac book and had it all up and running in minutes.)

So what you're saying is we both brought Fem-puters into our homes today?  What you are saying is neither of us will be getting much sleep tonight?  Who needs sleep when you've brought a new lady home?  Congrats.  (edit: wow with a new system and a bright monitor, YouTube is just going to eat up all my time...  Everything is so damn fast!  Awwwwwwe yeah!)

Jough - you are very sweet - and thanks for coming back and adding links.  I hope your dinner was good.  I finally tore myself away from my desk to feed myself when I was sure my stomach was starting to eat itself.

Question:  is there anything inherently better about uTorrent vs BitComet? my old system has BitComet on it (put on by a buddy who fixed it when it crashed), so I did get used to that, but with all the changes, I'm totally open to changing to something different/better.

[KeithHernandez]

We did, and it is pretty exciting.  My computer wasn't as old as yours, but it was very bad, and towards the end everything was broken.  I have just watched a you tube video on my own computer for the first time in over a year.  You should check out this thing on you tube that is a show made by people for that channel that is really cheap and people put on the programming (like Wayne's World, we don't have it here so the name is slipping my mind).  It is called Let's Paint TV, and the episodes are usually this guy trying to multi task by (this is the one I saw) painting, exercising and blending drinks.  He also takes calls, and as he is in a big city in California, it usually is gang members calling in, telling him to blend a banana or paint green, then yelling fuck the bloods, or something.  On second thought, it might have been better in your stoner days.

Also, uTorrent:  I have actually never used it, but it was voted the best one by the Oink community, which is very serious about its torrents.  I always used Azureus, and can personally recommend that, but you should try out uTorrent.  It is not that hard to uninstall if it is no good, you know?  AVG is also pretty good, and it is free.  If you somehow get viruses you can buy one then (at least that is what I would do).

How do you like the wonders of the 21st?  I am still getting used to my machine, but it is definitely a step up (I am not looking at duct tape).  Expensive though.

Oh yeah, how is Vista compared to XP? 

Also, I have gotten many a "shared" program in my day, and while it usually takes some work, it should be easy to find/ fairly easy to carry out.  Although I just used Open Office.  It is basically the same thing as Mic Office, but it uses alot more RAM.  You do have 2 gigs though, so it probably wouldn't matter.  Again, you might as well check it out (it is open source, which is very cool if you know about these things), free, and easy to uninstall if you want.

LAST THING:  I could not recommend Mozilla Firefox more.

[linnea]

that machine sounds chubby.

Man, I wish I could get a new computar. I have one that I got for $20 at an auction. It's ancient.  I have dreams of those titanium or aluminum Macintosh PowerBooks. I think they came up with a new name for them? Anyway, they're hawt. Maybe someday when I get a rich husband I'll have one.

[theinevitable]

or, you know, you could buy one instead of perfume?

*ducks* kidding!

[slink]

I'd say microtorrent (uTorrent) is better based on it being the one I know now. I used to use Azureus, but got sick of JREE crashing everything else.
I don't really know BitComet, but uTorrent just works, basically, and gives you decent speed capping, sorting  and priorotising of incoming torrent files, which I find handy on series of things.
Oh, nice spec system you got there, stick a decent graphics card in it you could never get any work done ever again! Oh, wait, that's possible on the lowliest of machines, eh?

[jough]

BitComet was doing something bad and not behaving correctly in regard to how it responded to torrent trackers so most trackers have banned it from being able to let you download things.

I started off with the BitTorrent client (the official one) and then moved to Azureus on someone's recommendation, which was eating up my system memory, so I switched to BitComet until I couldn't use it at most sites, now I'm using uTorrent.

Keith: congrats on your MacBook.  I'm getting one this week to celebrate launching my first big project here in Chicago.  Did you go white or black?

[KeithHernandez]

I went with the black.  I did so for a couple reasons:

Yesterday I went outside to smoke a cigarette, when I came back in my computer didn't function and I was tired of trying to just work around the problem.

I really need a computer, and was just going to get the middle white one, but when I went to the store they only had the cheapest white or the black, so I just went with the black.  This is a really bad idea, because I wanted like 160 gb harddrive and 2 gb of ram, but got 120 and 1, instead.  I should have gotten the cheapest one and upgraded to my standards, which probably could have been done with the money I saved.  I was kind of stressed out, didn't really think, and just bought the black.  But whatever, I'll just have to upgrade later.  At least I don't have to upgrade like RIGHT now, so that is good.

Anyhow, all of my friends and roommate have had macs for at least 2-3 years, so I had experience and love the switch so far.  These are really, really nice machines though.  Just smooth.  The way it is all set up, like expose and stuff, just make it a much better experience. 

Also, iChat is the coolest thing ever (I know this has been around for a while, but it is just cool is all, I haven't had this technology before.)