Well, here I am listing down the important tools and utilities I seem to use on the daily basis and without them life on internet & laptop really seems to be stuck, sort of 🙁

1. Winamp: No need to say anything. Winamp is possibly the best and lightest mp3 (these days videos also) player. Just run Winamp in the system tray and enjoy

2. Winrar: Utility to uncompress compressed files. Earlier winzip was my favorite but recently I swichted to Winrar as Winzip doesn’t support rar format. I am pretty happy using it.

3. Mozilla: I have almost stopped using Internet Explorer (except with some of the websites which say flat NO, sort of, to Mozilla). It is really good. With this I have stopped using any standalone download manager (DAP and Flashget have been among my favorites) also as Mozilla has one inbuilt and there are many addons also available.

4. Messengers: The latest communication channel: messengers. Latest versions of Yahoo, Gtalk and Skype.

5. uTorrent: Recently I started using torrents also. uTorrent, I am using as torrent client. It is light weight and pretty heavy to use. The only issue I have with it is that there is no feature like automatic bandwidth management. I have manually set a speed for download and upload as assiging the full badwidth to utorrent screws up normal surfing. And with manual settings when I am not surfing some of the bandwidth goes wasted 😉

6. Realplayer Alternate: I was a typical user who would stick with Real Player though its pretty heavy and eats a lot of resources. Sometime back my friend Vaibhav suggested me to go for Real Player alternate. I am happy using it now. very simple, small and precise 🙂

7. Replay Music: Just a new thing in my life too. A tool to record streaming audio, infact any audio coming out of sound card. Good one, saves as mp3 and has a very simple interface, just start, stop buttons and you are done.

8. RSS reader: Again a new item I am experimenting with. Till now I havn’t been able to find a good one. Generally the interface is clumsy and you don’t enjoy reading in that small window. I used RSS Reader first and using Omea Reader these days.

9. FSL Super finder: A replacement of windows search. I never liked (I seem to hate, indeed) windows search after Windows 2000. In XP it is totally screwed up. This one is a free utility with good interface and speed.

Use of all these tools makes me a happy user & surfer 🙂

Cheers
Sidhu