UKC

My eldest niece will be 18 tommorrow, and she's getting a laptop PC for a birthday present (largely as she'll be off to uni in OCtober). My brother in law's buying it, & I don't know what software it'll have but as they don't have broadband (not available despite living only a few km outside Salisbury) I thought I'd put some useful free software on a CD for her, at the moment my thoughts were
Firefox
Thunderbird
maybe GoogleEarth
ArcExplorer
iTunes
Realplayer

Any other suggestions ?

In reply to Doug:

antivirus: avg or similar.
open office

In reply to Doug: maybe ad-aware, removes all spyware adware, i find it useful

In reply to Doug: Irfanview and/or gimp

Bob

In reply to Doug: Any idea what it is bundled with?

In reply to Doug:
A firewall, don't trust the WinXP inbuilt one. (Agnitum Outpost and Kerio Personal Firewall are both free and perform well)
CCleaner (Crap cleaner, fixes problems and cleans temp files etc)

In reply to Lbos: No I don'talthough I assume it'll have Windows (XP ?)

Thanks for the suugestions, will start downloading later today

In reply to Doug:

Don't put anything that'll confuse her too much, a lot of stuff she won't use or have understanding of how it works. Windows firewall is sufficient for most home uses and the packet blocking is sufficient. A decent anti virus like AVG free edition would be my top choice, then maybe open office and real player. She'll never use firefox(unless she already does) and anyway as much as i'll get slated for saying this, internet explorer does the job...

Acrobat reader would be useful, along with a free graphics package like Paint Shop Pro(if it still has a trial version), other usful programs may include:

Winzip or WinRAR

In reply to Doug:

OpenOffice - has already suggested

WinAmp

IrfanView

ExactAudioCopy

ZoneAlarm & Avast (or AVG) - Firewall and AntiVirus - because I'd guess that when she goes to Uni, she will be connecting it to the Uni network in her halls of residence...

In reply to Doug:

Doug,

If she is plugging into a university network, she will need a good firewall, SP2 firewall will not be enough. My eldest and her friends had no end of viruses disrupting their PCs/laptops when they first connected to the uni network. By default the connection software supplied by the uni disabled firewalls so watch out for that as well.

Sandy.

In reply to Doug:

Not wishing to disagree with Dominion, but I really would say steer clear of openoffice - standardisation, ease of use and compatability matter more when it comes to bog-stock office apps, and openoffice lags behind on these.

Bear in mind she qualifies for a Student Edition of MS Office - install on up to 3 PCs for £100.

In reply to Anonymous:

By all means, disagree with me all you want. OpenOffice is going to better with version 2, but that's currently in beta testing.

Personally, I'd rather save £100, and it is of course possible that the Uni (rather than spending thousands each year on MS licences) may be in the process of switching over to OpenOffice anyway - although I doubt it, after all it's tax-payers money...

cdex

In reply to Dazzlindazdance:


...of falling prey to any worms/viruses/spyware that get past your firewall, antivirus and antispyware defences. Until all browsers are equally secure, it's a pretty sensible PC security tactic to avoid using IE if at all possible.

Internet Explorer does what job?

Internet explorer is a quick attempt to make Windows Explorer / ActiveX runtime engine display web pages. It fails because the web uses Javascript, CSS and HTML as defined by standards. Microsoft couldn't implement them properly and broke them not only in the browser but in the badly designed and insecure IIS server software. Internet Explorer was made to connect to Microsoft webservers. But microsoft's own webserver turned out to be so insecure that hardly anyone used it (including Microsoft). They were left with a crap browser - which they finally dropped. Firefox and Opera are the only two actively developed browsers - althought MS claim to be making IE7 which may or may not work, and may or may not be available to XP users.

In reply to Dominion:

OK, I will!

It' something I've looked at in a fair bit of detail for a couple of companies who considered switching - the costs of retraining staff, issues around file compatability and conversions, and product support were the show stopping issues for them.

For an individual user they become less so, until you decide to try and produce something a bit unusual - documents with complex graphics or layout, formulas, all kinds of stuff.

The roundtrip between Openoffice and MS Office will break SO many of these things it's just not funny, and that starts to matter.

Then you find that Openoffice only supports up to Office 97 file formats.

Then you find that support is essentially down to volunteers.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a terrific attempt to break the stranglehold of MS, but for some things standardisation is good, and I reckon Office apps is one of them.

In reply to Doug:

Is she doing anything engineery? If so, Bridge Builder:
http://downloads.theregister.co.uk/Windows/Games/Building/bridge-builder.ht...

In reply to Anonymous:


Which version of OpenOffice were you looking at? Version 1.0? It's currently on 1.1.4 and will open Office XP docs, spreadheets, and presentations...

I'm aware that there are file conversion compatibility issues. Then again, maybe more people should switch to OpenOffice, and that'll get rid of the problem

I often wonder just how much tax payers money goes straight to Microsoft year after year, in the UK alone, and that's just via the Education sector...

In reply to Dominion & others
many thanks to all

OK, so have downloaded a few things, but as a Mac user at home, and having no say in what antivirus/firewall, etc software I use at work I'm fairly ignorant when it comes to PC internet security.

I've just had a look at www.grisoft.com as someone said AVG was free, but it looks as if its just a 30 day trial - have I missed something, is the free version hidden somewhere ?

In reply to Doug:

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

Harder to find than it once was...

In reply to Doug: i have open office. i do like it, particularly the "word" part of it. however, the "spreadsheet" part of it will not do the graphs required for uni things, so i have to use excel on another computer for those.
if she is an arts student, then no probs, but for a scientist this might be more of a problem!

In reply to Doug:
Don't know what comes standard on new machines today, but would recommend:

Zonealarm firewall
Spybot
Some sort of backup utility in case of machine failure/loss
Eudora email

Anti-virus engine of choice. (I prefer f-prot though others may suggest different sw.)

Encourage her to keep zonealarm/spybot/antivirus up to date.


Other suggestions - try not to use IE / outlook express by default (Security by obscurity)
- get a usb memory pen thing for transfering files when the laptop isn't needed.

In reply to Doug:


It's a nice idea to give here alternatives to give her some choice, and to allow her to make up her own mind on the open source vs windows argument.

To be honest, for 99 % of normal users, nothing can beat Windows for its ability to work out of the box and do things better than the competition.

I'd avoid open office like the plague, imho. It feels like a cheap Taiwan knockoff compared to MS office, particularly wrt word and excel. (imho)

Firefox barfs with certain websites, who don't need to bother developing their code to cope with the funky differences between IE and mozilla.

In reply to norton850:


On the contrary, out of the box it does precious little, which is probably why the OP is trying to think of useful software which he can put on the laptop.

In reply to Matthew B: I don't think OpenOffice would be a good idea - you can end up with some pretty complex formatting when writing dissertations etc., it's bad enough trying to keep it all looking right taking in between different versions of Office (which is what will certainly be installed on the PC's at uni), I dread to think what the compatability's like with other Office software and there's nothing more frustrating than going to uni to print something out and finding all your pictures have jumped to the top of the page

I'd recommend that she waits till she gets to Uni, or phone before she goes, and find out from their computer sevices department what version of office they run and try and get hold of a copy of that for her.

As re: antivirus software, firewalls etc. you'll maybe find that the uni has a licence for something like McAffee that is available to all students (there is at the university of Edinburgh anyway)

I'd say WinZip, WinAmp, google desktop search, Adobe Acrobat reader are a good bet

Cheers,
Dave

In reply to David Benstead: You should teach her to write documents professionally, and get a latex compiler installed. Sure she'll swear and curse early on, but when she susses it the documents will look very good (actually this probably only has any relevance if she's going into a slightly technical subject (maths, sciences etc.) where formatting loads of equations and figures can be tricky).

Depending upon who you buy the package from, you might find word included (I've missed if you've said anything about bundled software), but otherwise it might be worth letting her decide what she needs in the way of word processers/spreadsheets etc. before you go filling up the hard drive with software she doesn't know how to use.

In reply to Liam M:

Latex! Are you mad! For the purposes of an undergraduate, Equation Editor in Word is perfectly adequate.

In reply to tony:


Learn 'em early! The amount of effort it takes to beat good and stable (i.e. not Word) thesis formatting in later is immense. If only they'd got it younger...

In reply to Liam M & others

I wasn't thinking of word processing, spreadsheets, etc as I don't know what she's used so far or what the uni will offer or demand (I know about MS educational deals & will make sure she does), university & subject still unknown at the moment (when are A level results due ? mid August ?). I was thinking more of small pieces of software which are either near essential (acrobat pdf reader), very useful (irfan, Realplayer, etc) or fun (google earth)

In reply to Doug:

All the stuff thats been mentioned is great but an 18 year old girl is more likely to want, msn messenger, yahoo messenger, a load of chat stuff and crap like that rather than all the "useful" stuff offered.

Winamp is in my opinion a bit better than I tunes.



Kev

In reply to tony: I've only just started learning how to use it as part of my PhD, and I'm really growing to like it. Sure, it seemed a hassle at first, but it gets rid of all those ridiculous formatting perculiarities in word.

I'll admit its probably not the easiest thing to write things directly into, and I still use a WYSIWIG editor for that, but for creating good looking documents, I've not found anything better.

In reply to arctickev: winamp is downloaded, never used msn or yahoo messenger - are they software ? I thought they were web sites (& ok, no comments on being ancient & out of touch

Doug the Msn and Yahoo Messenger applications are bits of software, you can download from the respective sites.

Most "youth" seem to like them, spend time chatting to mates and setting up "dubious" profiles!

Not that it should be condoned but she'd probably like some p2p software like limewire.

Kev

In reply to Doug: cant she get most of these things herself? most of them are useless until conected to the internet, and once conected she can download them herself. buy her some games instead!

In reply to ceri: as I said earlier, she only has a slow connection that takes ages to download anything

In reply to Doug:

I've only got dial-up, and it hasn't stopped me getting hold of most of the programs mentioned above. Apart from a firewall to protect her, there's not a lot that she needs supplying, to be honest.

Recommend Firefox though - if she has any brains she'll soon have it adapted to do exactly what she wants from a browser.

In reply to Richard:

Agreed, I use LaTeX exclusively for all my Open Uni. assignments, and on the odd occassion I'm forced to use Word at work, I spend more time formatting and fighting the bloody program than I actually do typing the content of my document.

In reply to Doug: Microsoft Office Pro. Win XP. Adobe Photoshop CS + any reliable antivirus software (AVG is fine).

In reply to Matthew B:


I wrote a paper in LaTeX recently, then passed it on to the person I was writing it with. He didn't know LaTeX, so I had to shift the whole thing across into Word for him. Thank God I could include all the diagrams and pictures in a separate file... but the references were a nightmare.

Which reminds me (for the OP) - if she will be using Word, you might want to buy her (or recommend someone else to buy her) some bibliographic software, like EndNote (http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/products/refman/endnote/ ). Or a copy of Bibtex, if you're passing on LaTeX.

In reply to Richard:

At Durham I could get EndNote subsidised from the Uni - best tell her to find out when she gets there, as the uni system may use a different program.

If you really want to get her something useful for the laptop, a proper optical mouse for when she's using it in her digs would be good - the touchpads and little nobbles laptops use are bloody annoying.

In reply to psd: Ah, end note - good idea! If she's doing a science subject she'll thank you for it when she's got 100 references to type into word. I think LaTex might be a bit overkill, although to be honest I balked when they said I should learn to "program" LaTex - maybe I'm just lazy! If you know what you're doing in Word then it's not too bad for formatting, so maybe a Microsoft Word for Dummies type book would be useful?

As for fun stuff to while away the hours, buy her a copy of Lemmings! It did for my exams when I was at school....

Cheers,
Dave