* Rule Number One: don't email Word documents!

Windows apps

Lifehacker

Anyone serious about using the best applications to be productive at work will benefit from reading the Lifehacker blog, especially anything written by Gina Trapani. See for example her articles

• Guide to free software and web apps
• PC Decrapifier
• Convert Word documents to cruft-free HTML
• Superior alternatives to crappy Windows software

Gina Trapani has also written a fabulously useful book, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. I heartily recommend it to anyone with a computer and an iota of curiosity.

Freeware/Shareware

Note: I haven't used Windows since 2004 (except to write lecture notes on my Tablet PC), so this list is somewhat out of date. YMMV.

Web and Email

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Thunderbird

SSH and SFTP

PuTTY

WinSCP, FileZilla

LaTeX editing

winedt, MiKTeX, Emacs (cmd line howto: "gunzip -c -d emacs.tar.gz | tar xvf -"), Willem Minten's TeX/Emacs instructions , GNU page on emacs

PDF

Adobe Acrobat [Reader]

PS

Ghostscript

C compiler

MinGW

Unix-like utilities

Unix utils

Zipping

PowerArchiver

Fun

iTunes

Commercialware

System

Norton Antivirus for UofT users, Norton Ghost

Apps

ICLSO for UofT users [Acrobat, Maple, etc. ...]

 

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  Last updated: 20080503