I spent most of yesterday reformatting and reinstalling stuff on my TabletPC following a particularly virulent malware infestation (which I picked up at a public internet cafe in Manila … don’t ask). It’s been a lot of fun so far, because Windows XP is pretty snappy during the first few weeks of a fresh install and it makes the whole experience a lot less painful.
What’s great about all this is that I’ve finally had a chance to implement this little freeware/Web2.0 experiment that I’ve been thinking about doing since late last year. The experiment is pretty simple actually: all I want to do is figure out how long I can last without installing a payware application on my machine. This is probably gonna be a bit tricky due to my Adobe/Macromedia fetish, but hell, that’s why it’s an experiment.
So far I have a pretty decent array of freeware installed:
For programming in PHP, I’m using the very elegant PHP Designer 2006 Beta; I actually bought a license for Zend 5.0 (the gold standard of PHP IDEs), but Designer is decent enough for casual hacking. I write Javascript and CSS without a proper IDE, but for debugging I use the unbelievably useful Firebug extension for Firefox (which, as you can probably tell, is my default browser).
For file-transfers, I use FileZilla. For SSH and Telnet, I use PuTTY. For text editing, I use Notepad++, which works great with any of the open text formats. (For editing Word and/or Excel documents, I have to use either gOffice or AjaxWrite, which aren’t perfect solutions but are good enough for now.) For archive management, I use 7-ZIP. For virus protection, I use Free AVG.
For videos, I have the super-excellent Media Player Classic, and for music I have iTunes (yeah, well it’s free isn’t it?). For iPod management, I use YamiPod.
For communicaton, I’m using Yahoo Messenger for my YM contacts, and Meebo for everything else.
For image-editing, I’m currently experimenting with GIMPShop. It remains to be seen whether it’ll be a viable alternative to the dreaded Photoshop, but I should at least be able to do small web graphics on it regardless.
My big problem is that I currently have no replacements for InDesign, Illustrator or Flash, which are all apps that I use really regularly. If I find decent alternatives for these three, I just might be able to keep my tablet free of payware for a good long time.