Essential Software

My wife and I just bought a new computer from Dell. It took Jenn only minutes before she asked "Where's WinZip?" Here are the programs that I downloaded so that the new computer could be as helpful as the old one.

• WinZip
  
  How in the world is this not even installed with this new PC? My registration key for WinZip dates back to 1997!
  
  
• PuTTY
  
  I can't compute without a good terminal client. A terminal client allows me to access my UNIX machines, where I do nearly all of my professional and recreational computing. I have a registration for SecureCRT from VanDyke Software but PuTTY is free and quite fully-featured.
  
  
• Firefox
  
  What? Did you expect me to use Internet Explorer? Firefox is light and safe. It blocks pop ups. It has tabbed browsing. It has a whole bevy of cool plug-ins that make web programming much easier.
  
  
• TightVNC
  
  To access our old computer to migrate files off of it, I just plugged it into our router. Then from my new PC I ran the TightVNC client to access the TightVNC server running on my old PC. This software allowed us to run our old PC without a monitor!
  
  I am still impressed with this technology. When I learned about it a few years ago, I thought it was amazingly cool. Now, it's not only cool, it's useful too.