Best windows applications for Aspire One?

So I thought I'd start a thread on applications that seem to work well on the smaller screen of the AAO. I've found two applications that run great on this. First, the new Google Chrome browser. It's great because the top is just the application tabs and the address bar. This leaves more real estate for the actual web pages.

Second, I've found that I like Evernote better for note taking over OneNote. The screen works well and the tree navigation is very clean.

What applications do you recommend?

Paul

 

I just installed my old MS Office 2003 into my Acer One Works Perfectly Smooth on a 1.5GB+1.8" 100GB HD
So does the old Macro Media Studio 8 (Before they Merged it with Adobe CS3)

I am now looking for some other help full programs i can use.

 

Total Commader - a very useful and feature rich Windows Explorer replacement

you can get it from www.ghisler.com

 

I'm a Firefox fan, so I've kept Firefox. I like chrome, but its a bit buggy, plus you can't beat Firefox's awesome add-on ability.

Another program i added is launchy, the application launcher, just hit the hotkey combo, and type in the app you want to launch. It keeps my desktop very neat and clean, and launchy indexes your apps and gives you suggestions as you type. http://www.launchy.net/

I wanted to go with a minimalist approach with my AAO, having icons on the small desktop feels really cluttered, so all i have on there is Firefox and the recycle bin.

If you want an image editor, GIMP works and is free. I also installed open office for my office needs. And VLC media player for my media files.

Anyone else have cool apps they installed in their AAO?

I'm looking for a better battery application (preferably on the desktop), desktop clock application (i want to completely get rid of the windows taskbar), lightweight media center application (to hook up my AAO to a tv at other people's houses), or anything else to get rid of the win task bar. I think i'm getting obsessed with the minimalist approach

 

I love Yahoo widgets!

For Win/XP they tart up the desktop a treat and provide a lot of nice stuff including wifi power, battery indicator, SSD memory etc + (with internet) things such as RSS feeds and weather.

 

I like Notebook hardware Control (NHC)
http://www.pbus-167.com/

Great little util that provides a ton of info that you can display in your taskbar. I personally set it up to show battery left (time left or percentage) and CPU load.

 

I use Internet Explorer, just press F11 to get it in full screen.

 

F11 also works with firefix, shame it doesnt work with Chrome.

 

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Open Office - specially if you bought the Linux version and converted it to Windows - nothing like a full office suite to help you give a professional flair to your new toy.

I also recommend Daemon Tools Lite - now you can take all those CD programs you love, create an image file of them, then access them by means of a virtual cd drive.

I also like Belarc advisor to see exactly what components are in my machine.

Some sort of anti-spyware is advisable; I like spybot, super anti-spyware, and ad-aware

An Av program is good to have - I like Avira

I like rocket dock to give my desktop a clean look.

VLC Player/Videolan is a nice media player.

I also installed irfanview for some basic image file editing.

 

After a full, standard XP SP2 installation and all Acer official drivers, then tweak XP -no paging file, disable write cache, disable prefetching, disable unnecesary services, etc.-, these are the apps I suggest to be installed:

- Winup 2.9 (updates XP off-line. A must have. You can delete it after performing the update. http://www.winup.es. It's in Spanish, but simply decompress and run the provided actualizar.bat file and an off-line update is run - which takes around 1 hour to complete! No more Windows Update!).
- Firefox 3 (must be configured -no cache, disable session state saving, etc.- for a smooth internet browsing).
- Google toolbar for Firefox 3 (customize it -i.e., small icons, etc- for a bigger browser screen).
- aMSN (powerful clone of MSN Messenger, lighter).
- 7zip (which handles zip and rar files perfectly, even compress to zip format).
- Irfanview (simple and light image viewer with some basic editing funcions).
- K-Lite Codec Pack (standard version installs all video codecs you need and MediaPlayerClassics, another must-have).
- AIMP2 (music player similar to Winamp but slightly lighter).
- Office2003 (a small installation, TinyOffice2003, works great).
- FoxIt Reader (for PDF reading, much lighter than Acrobat Reader).
- Spybot Search & Destroy (to avoid malware/spyware issues).
- HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (perfect for formatting your pendrive/SD cards and better than the XP app).
- ERUNT (app which makes a full backup of the registry, as System Restore is deactivated).
- CCleaner (great app to keep XP registry clean).

All of the apps are freeware and run perfectly on the AAO, even the basic model (512, 8 Gb SSD). System slowdowns are reduced to minimal, browsing the internet is smooth and video/music playback is perfect.

 

Yesterday discovered Webguide4

http://www.asciiexpress.com/webguide/default.aspx

This is an add on for Media Center (either XP or Vista) and among other things streams TV and video from your host computer. I have a P4 box in the lounge which I use for recording TV etc. With Webguide4 it means I can watch live TV anywhere in the house (and even the garden). Although I haven't yet tried it in principal it is possible to stream via the internet so that with the ONE and a Wifi connection somewhere it should be possible to pick up your local TV anywhere.

Totally awesome: and the best bit is that it is freeware!

Note that the software is installed only on the host computer as everything can be done from the browser so on the ONE the only software that is needed is a Webbrowser + Windows Media Player.

 

I have the 8 GB SSD version with WinXP so real estate is at a premium. I have opted to go with portable apps. You can download numerous apps at http://www.portableapps.com

These apps are designed to run off of a USB flash drive as they don't update the Windows registry and all of them simply run from the directory where the app is installed. I installed their "suite" on an SDHC card and then added/deleted whatever I wanted. Then I placed their menuing application on my desktop as an icon. I just launch their menu and can have a separate "Start Menu" in my system tray for my portable apps. This way, my SSD space is not consumed and my Windows registry is not polluted.

I re-image my Windows periodically using Acer's system recovery disks and re-tweak to keep things running lickety split.

The only drawback with portable apps is that the file types don't get associated with the application so you can't double click on a data file to launch the app automatically. It is not hard to get into the habit of opening the app and then opening the file from within the app.

 

Plus on the touchpad if you use two fingers in a "spread apart" motion, Internet Explorer zooms the web page larger.

 

I have to echo tkwok's praise of Portable Apps.
Even with plenty of hard drive space as on the AO150, portable apps are generally coded lean and are well suited to the AAO's limited resources. Within the PortableApps.com domain they only serve open source titles, but other popular shareware and proprietary freeware titles are beginning to offer portable versions of their own.

If you're not concerned with hiding your use of portable apps (on your own PC), you can manually associate file extensions to those apps through the "open with" and "browse" dialog, and checking the box will usually make them stick. That may affect the MRU cache, I'm not sure. A registry cleaner will likely remove those associations if run without the drive connected that contains the apps.

 

If you know how to make your own portable applications, you'll find the programs on portableapps.com osbsolete, slow, unsecure, handicapped in all sorts of ways. Also, you can make closed source programs portable if you make your own portable applications. I for example have made my own copy of portable office 2007 and adobe master collection pack.

 

actually their programs dont leave any traces of the software ever being used. Unlink your office 07 and master suite which add registry entries, so unless you have admin rights your software wont run on other computers

 

Actually, the the portableapps.com's program does leave traces on the storage device. It's called the attributes folder or something. Thus it can be hacked, modified, exploited, damaged in certain ways.

Meaningwhile, my Portable office 2007 and adobe master collection suite doesn't leave any traces at all. They're virtual applications which is the same thing as portableapps's programs except it has all the portableapps program limition removed. It's completely isolated thus doesn't require admin previliges. It has it's own virtual registry that it writes things to thus no registry file will be written into the host machine. It's also a lot faster than portable apps because of tweaked virtualization files, registry, etc specifically tuned for the AAO. Through virtual registry and file editor, i could update, change, modify the virtual program which portableapps program lacks the ability of.

Again, portableapps programs are really very handicapped virtual applications. The developers removed a lot of features to make it easier for newbies to use.

 

GIMP 2.0 - open source photo/image editing
Pidgin - open source IM
COMODO - anti-virus/security
Rainlendar2 - Calendar, To Do Lists, Event Reminders, Alarms
Evernote - note-taking, PDF back-up, saving news clips (what I mostly use it for)
ooVoo - video chat
TeamSpeak2 - for talking during games, or w/e u choose

all are free.

 

Firefox - F11 is a must! Also get Adblock Plus - Getting all the banner adds of the page is very very help full with a small screen and if your on slow wifi!
Media Player 10 + K-Lite Codec pack takes care of my music/tv/films
Windows Live messenger
AVG - Can't go on my uni wireless network without a valid upto date anti virus running.
Windows Firewall
Acer Aspire One (AA1) Fan Control - keep it nice and quiet

Basically all i use on there.

 

My one vote that I will cast is for:

Virtual dessktop manager. This program is a free download from Microsoft, in the Power Toys section. It gives XP users the XFCE desktop-switching like you get in Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. Very handy to have four virtual desktops when you have such a small screen. Eliminates a lot of window searching confusion.