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Without getting into ancient history, and the platforms I’ve worked on, if you are under the age of 40, you’ve used Windows at some point in your life. Every version of Windows promised a brave new future chuck full of features; however as any P.C. user can state, with the introduction of new technology always generates new unforeseen problems.

Windows 7 changes all that, with a stable platform, that will support any user, from the occasional emailer, to the power user doing graphics to animations, digital audio workstations (D.A.W.) to film editing and architectural designs. I am using the Windows 7 64bit beta build, and I have to say, for once, I am really excited for the actual launch/release date. But with any new platform, you’ll

have to be up to date with your software.

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Audacity is an audio editor and it works. 

WinZip is a compression utility that is worth its weight in salt.

Acronis True Image is bar-none my favorite backup & imaging software.

Acronis Disk Director Suite The ULTIMATE in disk/partition creations.

SpywareBlaster - Best free Malware protection out there.

Norton Antivirus 2011 the coding on this is superb. On my Quad Core laptop, when running, its footprint is less than 1% on all four cores – that’s amazing! 

Roxio Toast 11 is the best burning software for both P.C. & Macintosh alike. Super easy to use, rich and full of features, supports the Light Scribe technology If you can’t do it with Roxio, it just can't be done.  

Pidgin this is your MacGyver of I.M. (instant messenger) programs. The only thing that comes remotely close to what Pigdin does, on the Macintosh side is AdiumX.

Apple’s QuickTime – This is a standard feature you always should have installed on your computer.  Most videos are optimized for QuickTime, all browsers support it, and it’s just a very good thing to keep installed.

Windows Media Player 12– Microsoft has re-invented their classic media player. In 12 (which is Windows 7 only) it has built-in support for most of the popular formats both audio and video. They’ve beefed It up by adding 3GP, AAC, AVCHD, MPEG-4, WMV & WMA; it also supports most AVI, DivX, MOV & Xvid formats.

VLC is the free open source, cross-platform multimedia Swiss army knife. When you have issues opening any video, audio, DVD or VCD file, give VLC a shot, you will be amazed at how it performs.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 – by far, Microsoft has outdone them selves this time, this is the Internet Explorer we’ve all been waiting for. Also you can move the temp files and cache files to an external hard drive, flash drive, or even a Ram disk.

Google Chrome – It’s quick loading, fast acting and has the world’s famous Google architecture that many of us are huge fans of.

Mozilla’s Firefox (en-US) is one of the standard staple of web browsers for all three platforms, P.C., Linux & Macintosh.

Apple’s Safari – Safari is Apple’s own version of the web browser. They developed it for the P.C. platform years ago.

Opera – this is one of the first web browsers out there, its sparse interface allows for quick loading time. I use several web browsers as some sites work better with different browsers. Opera is great in a pinch when you need it most!

Microsoft’s Silverlight – a powerful development platform for creating an interactive user exepreince for the web, desktop and mobile applications when on/offline

Internet Download Manager – It pulls multiple leads/instances, however it will absorb your bandwidth. If you need something in a jiffy this little beauty has saved me on numerous occasions.

RAMDriv – It allows you to covert part of your system ram into a virtual hard disk. On a system with 4gb of ram, I generally like to allocate 640mb into a virtual drive. Any program that allows me to redirect the cache footprint, I’ll stick in here. Everything loads super quick, and it’s a resource that is self-purging upon restart. Try it in your I.E. browser, and be amazed how fast it opens up for you!

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