updated on feb­ruary 8^th — added: defrag­gler & cdburn­erxp

aside from an infinite supply of free, messed up porn that this writer has access to, the internet has opened up the floodgates to new ideas on doing the same shitty, menial tasks day in and day out. we are no longer stuck in the rut of using badly-​coded, expensive, or down­right ugly pro­grams that slow down our com­puters and do their tasks so poorly that you wonder if the pro­gram­mers who made these pieces of shit hates you.

as such, we here at vexed have com­piled a nice and tidy list of pro­grams that offer viable, time-​saving and resource-​efficient altern­at­ives to what’s out there in the main­stream. this will be a infre­quently updated guide on the latest and greatest altern­at­ives to what you use every day, from notepad to microsoft office, to how you watch movies and illeg­ally burn onto dvds to sell in chin­atown from the trunk of your car at $5 a pop.

so let’s begin:

if you use ADAWARE or any spyware/​malware pro­gram, con­sider SPYBOT SEARCH & DESTROY.

[slider title=“why should i use SPYBOT?”]let’s face it. spy­ware has been a problem on the internet since the day everyone found out how much money can be made off of it. as long as money-​for-​clickthroughs remains a reality, com­panies — some legit­imate, some not so much — will try to infect your com­puter with ads to the point where you can barely surf the internet because everyone wants a piece of your band­width. everyone’s prob­ably got some sort of anti-​spyware/​malware installed on their com­puters, but SPYBOT is head and shoulders above the rest. not only will it scan you com­puter, it will patch your hosts file (the hosts file is a system file on your com­puter that dir­ects traffic) to make sure that insi­dious little ad pro­grams don’t re-​direct your internet access. this func­tion is called “immun­iz­a­tion” and has been the hall­mark of the SPYBOT package ever since it was released. stop­ping spy­ware BEFORE it ever gets on your com­puter goes a long way into pro­tecting your­self. con­sider it a kind of pre­vent­ative medi­cine, rather than a reactive one. a lot of spy­ware and mal­ware these days are pro­grammed to be res­istant to removal by hiding them­selves in mul­tiple places in your com­puter. when you immunize with SPYBOT, they’re blocked before they can even be installed. it’s a little ugly, and not as glit­tery as adaware, but it’s powerful, effi­cient, and con­stantly updated. long­time users (such as myself) swear by it, and you should too.[/slider]

if you use NOTEPAD, con­sider NOTEPAD++.

[slider title=“why should i use NOTEPAD++?”]the first and only text editor that most of you have prob­ably ever used and loved (read: hated) is notepad. sure, it’s great for writing down the quick phone number, or a mental note. hell, i used to use it all the time to write all my rough drafts when i had dreams of being a pro­fes­sional writer (as you can tell, since i’m writing here, that dream fizzled pretty hard). but if you’re a pro­grammer, or you edit big files and want some­thing a little more powerful without the bag­gage of an office suite, then you need to check out this little pro­gram. it has built in colour-​coded syntax detectors to help you iron out any issues with your pro­gram­ming, and it has a tabbed inter­face, just like every browser out there so you can edit and com­pare mul­tiple files at a time.[/slider]

if you use WINAMP, con­sider FOOBAR 2000.

[slider title=“why should i use FOOBAR2000?”]i loved winamp when it first came out. it was new and dif­ferent and for most of us, the only readily-​available free mp3 player (that also played every other audio format). since that time, null­soft got bought out by aol, and while winamp has remained free for the most part, it has come out with a “pro” ver­sion that you need to pay for, and has steadily become more bogged down with a lot of bull­shit that you don’t need. sure it’s pretty, but hon­estly, are you really going to sit there and stare at the inter­face for hours on end? no, you min­imize it and go on with your work. that’s where foobar comes in. they have finally just released v1.0 and while it’s bare­bones com­pared to almost every single audio player out there in terms of looks, it matches and bests others in terms of func­tion­ality, extend­ab­ility, and wins the pound-​for-​pound crown because it does everything with a smaller memory foot­print than all other players.[/slider]

if you use WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER, con­sider VLC or CCCP.

[slider title=“why should i use VLC or CCCP?”]alright, before i get in trouble with super­n­erds every­where, let me cla­rify that CCCP is not actu­ally a media player. it’s a codec pack, but it comes bundled with a light­weight, super­func­tional pro­gram called media player classic home­cinema. CCCP was ori­gin­ally started by a bunch of crazy otaku geeks who wanted to watch their naruto unin­ter­rupted and put together the most used codecs into one stable pack so that you didn’t need to hunt every­where on the internet to play videos. then they got into a war (still ongoing) with the people doing k-​lite codec pack. cas­u­al­ties were enormous.

as for VLC media player, what can i say except that it’s the most ver­satile and powerful player out there. it’s ugly as sin, and may be a little over­whelming for people coming from pretty shini­ness of win­dows media player, but it’s good stuff.

besides, if you’ve got a broad­band internet con­nec­tion and aren’t a com­plete retard, you’re prob­ably already down­loading all sorts of videos, so you might as well get CCCP to solve your codec prob­lems, and VLC to play the videos, with media player classic as a light­weight backup pro­gram. once you com­plete this task, girls will find you more attractive.[/slider]

if you use LIVE MESSENGER, AIM, YAHOO, etc, con­sider PIDGIN or DIGSBY.

[slider title=“why should i use PIDGIN or DIGSBY?”]the first instant mes­senger i ever used was ICQ. that piece of shit was so bloated, i could feel my com­puter gain 50lbs whenever i started it up. although i do miss the “uh oh” sound whenever i got a mes­sage, i’m glad those days of bloat­ware are over. with the myriad of mes­sen­gers out there right now, a new breed of multiple-​protocol mes­sen­gers have arisen and taken a foothold, though their mar­ket­share is sur­pris­ingly small. the first one i ever used was tril­lian (it’s still around, alive and kicking) but i did not like the dir­ec­tion it was taking (more com­mer­cial­ised, and heavier on the resources). if you want to talk to a bunch of people across all the major mes­senger net­works, then your best bets are pidgin and digsby, by a long shot. i’m per­son­ally a bigger fan of pidgin, but this girl i know thinks digsby is much prettier.[/slider]

if you use NORTON ANTIVIRUS, con­sider MICROSOFT SECURITY ESSENTIALS.

[slider title=“why should i use MICROSOFT SECURITY ESSENTIALS?”]it’s easy to hate on microsoft. they screw up all the time. but when they actu­ally do get some­thing right, it almost blows your mind. microsoft security essen­tials (msse) is actu­ally the one time they got it right. it’s funny that through out the years, microsoft has thrown us badly coded, expensive soft­ware and provided almost little-​to-​no pro­tec­tion. have you ever heard of security center in XP pro­tecting anyone… from any­thing? me either.

but hey, msse has come around with the launch of win­dows 7 (there are ver­sions for XP and VISTA as well), and it actu­ally has excel­lent detec­tion rates and is even faster than all the big name anti-​virus/​anti-​malware products out there — and this includes my beloved nod32. best of all: it is free (as long as you pass genuine val­id­a­tion). so stop paying for security. msse is fast and effi­cient, so you won’t notice it the way you notice other anti-​virus pro­grams. by the way, i have no idea why a com­pany like norton has stayed in busi­ness all this time… and if you’re using it, you’re an idiot. also, for you happy-​go-​lucky pir­ates out there who also want a free solu­tion, but can’t pass win­dows genuine val­id­a­tion, try avira. it scores much better than avg.[/​slider]

if you use ADOBE READER, con­sider FOXIT READER or GOOGLE DOCS.

[slider title=“why should i use FOXIT READER or GOOGLE DOCS?”]there is only one com­pany that i hate more than apple, and it’s adobe. adobe is one of those com­panies that makes you down­load one thing to down­load another. they give you a run­around, and everything that you get from them comes with a catch. from bundled down­loads to abso­lutely bloated pieces of shit that slows down your com­puter, adobe has it all. unfor­tu­nately, they also own flash and shock­wave so we can’t really ignore them.

anyway, a few years back, a rus­sian dude exposed major security holes in adobe soft­ware. instead of hiring the guy as a con­sultant (the smart thing), adobe called the cops and had him arrested (retards). ever since, i have not been a fan. but because of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty they own, it’s almost impossible to avoid them, espe­cially if you’re a streaming-​video addict like me. unfor­tu­nately, there is no flash alternative.

how­ever, when it comes to PDF, there are plenty, so you should try FOXIT READER. it’s about 1/​3 the size of adobe reader and does the job just fine. it even has a firefox plugin so you’ll be able to open PDFs in your browser. or you can be cool like me, and use CHROME BETA 4, where there is a plugin to have all your PDFs go dir­ectly into GOOGLE DOCS without needing to down­load them (in case any firefox fan­boys feel lonely, the google docs plugin for firefox can be found here). google docs also recently imple­mented file uploading. con­sid­ering it opens about any human-​readable doc­u­ment format out there, and the fact that your doc­u­ments go every­where you have an internet con­nec­tion, there really is no reason not to use it. let’s not even men­tion the fact that it’s oper­ated by google, so it goes without saying: while storing your doc­u­ments is easy, sharing them is even easier with google docs. ser­i­ously, free your­self from as many adobe products as pos­sible. your com­puter will thank you for it.[/slider]

if you use NERO, con­sider CDBURNERXP.

[slider title=“why should i use CDBURNERXP?”]i don’t know why they haven’t changed the product name yet (god love the swedish and their quaint­ness), but cdburn­erxp will burn your DVDs, BLU-​RAYs, and HD-​DVDs (if anyone’s still got one) — basically any media that can be burned, will be burned by this baby. it’s fast, it’s free, and it’s won a ton of awards. the inter­face is super simple to use and has enough advanced options to keep even the most demanding users happy. the down­load is tiny com­pared to all the major name soft­ware out there and i’m sure once you’ve tried it out once, you’ll never go back.[/slider]

if you use ANY PC CLEANING TOOL, con­sider CCLEANER.

[slider title=“why should i use CCLEANER?”]there’s an unbe­liev­able plague of “clean-​my-​pc” applic­a­tions out there, and most of them cost money. some of them are insi­dious enough to actu­ally cause the prob­lems them­selves, and then require you to pay a fee for an upgraded, pro­fes­sional ver­sion that will clean the mess that it cre­ated. awe­some busi­ness model. on the other hand, we have CCLEANER — simple, tiny, fast, and free. it’ll clean all your tem­porary files, your browser caches, your indexed pages and thumb­nail caches, and even scan your registry for anom­alies and orphaned keys. in short, the best way to keep your com­puter fast and glitch-​free is to take care of it by using smart pro­grams like this one. no amount of soft­ware will do that for you, but good soft­ware like ccle­aner will def­in­itely help in the pro­cess. do not get fooled by any soft­ware that claims to keep your com­puter fast and boost its speed but asks you to pay $20 – 30 (but hey, if you’re an idiot, go ahead and pay). there are free altern­at­ives every­where and ccle­aner is simply the best at its job.[/slider]

if you use ADOBE PHOTOSHOP, con­sider GIMP.

[slider title=“why should i use GIMP?”]i under­stand that pho­toshop is the industry standard, but let’s be honest here: most people who use pho­toshop cas­u­ally are not doing any­thing ridicu­lous. most people that are not in the image editing busi­ness tend more to use pho­toshop as an mspaint replace­ment to draw funny mus­taches on grandma and print them out as christmas cards. this is where gimp comes in. it’s sort of a middle ground between the super-​high-​end multi-​hundred-​dollar soft­ware suites, and the mspaint you used when you were a kid and thought it was the coolest game ever. gimp is actu­ally sur­pris­ingly powerful and get­ting better with every release. also, it runs much better on much lower-​end machines than pho­toshop does, and will not eat away at your system resources the way pho­toshop is prone to do. give gimp a try if you’re looking for a light­weight, func­tional, and tested image editor.[/slider]

if you use MICROSOFT OFFICE, con­sider OPEN OFFICE.

[slider title=“why should i use OPEN OFFICE?”]when microsoft releases products, they usu­ally release them in a series. a ver­sion for stu­dents, a ver­sion for pro­fes­sionals, a ver­sion for hogwart’s school for wiz­ardry. they assume every demo­graphic is cut from the same cloth, and if you require a cer­tain fea­ture from one product, you will have to pay a stag­ger­ingly higher price for the next ver­sion up. a lot of people who know what the hell they’re talking about will tell you that OPEN OFFICE is easily one of the stur­diest and flex­ible pro­ductivity suites out there, and it comes with a coun­ter­part to every office applic­a­tion. it has its own ver­sion of WORD, EXCEL, POWERPOINT, ACCESS, and even comes with a DRAWING/​IMAGE EDITING pro­gram. all this for free. it’s also cre­ated with com­pat­ib­ility in mind, so any doc­u­ment you write in open office will work in microsoft office and vice-​versa, except when microsoft decides to be bas­tards and create an entire new doc­u­ment system (but open office is quick with com­pat­ib­ility updates so this is not a big deal).[/slider]

if you use O&O Defrag, Per­fect­Disk, or Disk­Keeper, con­sider DEFRAGGLER.

[slider title=“why should i use DEFRAGGLER?”]there are a lot of defrag­ging applic­a­tions out there. a lot of the bigger names like per­fect­disk and disk­keeper, you have to pay for. but like many other great, system-​saving, main­ten­ance soft­ware out there, there are a lot of free applic­a­tions to keep your files in order and your hard­drive run­ning smoothly. DEFRAGGLER, by the same people who make CCLEANER, is prob­ably the best of the free defrag applic­a­tions out there. it is small, fast, and will do pretty much the same job as the com­mer­cial defrag options out there. if you want some­thing that does its job prop­erly, get DEFRAGGLER now.[/slider]