Indiscriminate Transgressions

virtual pc, free

and

free VMs with IE6 IE7 and IE8

Yours Truly,

Minimalist360

Here’s a program with the confusing name of VistaStartMenu. Thing is, it’s a great replacement for the existing Vista start menu.

From the developer page:

Now imagine that someone secretly came in and rearranged your your things into random places. Your player is on the sofa today, tomorrow it is in the refrigerator and the next day you find it in your car. Such a situation could easily lead to a nervous breakdown!

Now, let’s get back to discussing computer programs. Imagine a software developer who decided to make the buttons in his program randomly change their positions from time to time. This example seems absurd because obviously it is impossible to use such a program. If you think that there are no such programs in real life, you will be disappointed. You use one of these programs every day.

This program is called the “Start” menu.

Try it, you may like it.

…without all the crap.

The main Nero Burning ROM program is perfect for what I use burning software for. I can make data CDs and DVDs, dual layer DVDs, and if I have VOBs I can create a Video-DVD. I can save a disk layout, and load it later and burn it. Burning works, supports some nice features like overburning and verification, and that’s about it.

The problem is, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to install just the Nero Burning ROM program. No matter what you do, it installs Nero Scout, which then immediately starts indexing files on your hard drive. It installs a variety of other crap, and you end up with 4-5 loaded processes. That’s if you JUST chooses Nero Burning ROM.

So, NERO is dead to me, in the same way that Real Media is dead to me. (Backgrounder, Real Media had a completely deceptive install program that turned on all kinds of features. It did so by showing you a scroll box with 4 items shown, all unchecked, and then if you scroll down you see 4 “Adware” type programs are checked.) On principal, I will NEVER install any Real product on any platform ever again.

So with all of Nero’s crap, and the fact that they are charging $50 upgrades every 18months or so for not a lot of new stuff, means that I’d like to send that the way of Real.

Does anyone use a CD/DVD burning program that does as I described above? If so, can you comment?

Thanks in advance.

These are all Windows applications, and I use them under Vista on my MacBook Pro. Yes I like the Macbook Pro, but I can’t use OSX because it’s too painful. Anyhow, all of the following refer to Windows applications.

Paint.NET

I’m not a graphic designer, but I do have to use Photoshop occasionally for production work. It’s ludicrously expensive. I mean, you get a boatload of stuff if you buy CS3, including Flash if you buy the right version, but it’s really really expensive. Paint.NET is a Photoshop-like program, written in C#/.NET, free, source included, etc.

Foxit PDF Reader

This is faster, and uses less resources than Adobe’s PDF Reader. Free. I’d imagine it supports less “stuff” than the Adobe version, like the forms and all that, but I don’t know. What I do know is that it doesn’t take 30 seconds to load and shows me PDFs.

PDFCreator

PDFCreator is free, and creates PDFs. It acts as a printer driver and has plugins for some applicationss. Has a few weird issues under Vista, but mostly works fine. And it creates PDFs. And doesn’t cost $400 or make you think about which version of Adobe CS3 you are going to have to get to maximize your money dollars. Oh, and it creates PDFs.