Today on Digg, there was a story about software that slows down Windows XP substantially. The worst offender? Norton Anti-Virus et. al. That sparked a discussion regarding light or lighter weight applications to replace those applications that slow you down to a crawl. I decided to compile that list here, a "one stop shop" if you will. All programs listed are free and have been given satisfactory ratings by those in the Digg community. Enjoy!
Anti-Virus:
AVG Free - http://free.grisoft.com/doc/28415/lng/us/tpl/v5
Avast! Antivirus - http://www.avast.com/
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com
PDF Reader:
Foxit Reader - http://www.foxitsoftware.com/
PDF Creation: (Added 7/28/07)
PDF Creator - http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
Media Players:
VLC - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Media Player Classic - http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
Foobar2000 - http://www.foobar2000.org
ffdshow - (Open source video codecs for Windows): http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/ffdshow.cfm
Real Alternative - http://www.free-codecs.com/download_soft.php?d=2541&s=65
Quicktime Alternative - http://www.free-codecs.com/download_soft.php?d=2829&s=66
Web Browsers:
Firefox- http://www.getfirefox.com
Opera - http://www.opera.com
K-Meleon- http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?id=Download
Email:
Thunderbird - http://www.getthunderbird.com
Bit-Torrent Client:
uTorrent - http://www.utorrent.com/
Anti-Spyware:
Spybot: Search and Destroy-http://www.safer-networking.org/
AdAware SE - http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10399602.html?tag=lst-0-1
IM:
Gaim: http://gaim.sourceforge.net
Trillian: http://www.trillian.cc
Meebo: http://www.meebo.com
Miranda IM: http://www.miranda-im.org
Firewall:
Comodo Firewall Pro http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/
Edit: Almost forgot, if you don't want to change software, you can always try FreeRAM XP Pro to free up system memory. I also added uTorrent since some almost shat their pants over its absence.
Technorati Tags: Lightweight Apps, Alternative Windows Applications
67 comments:
opera does email too. (thought you should mention that - it's firefox + thunderbird + widgets + slideshows + bittorrent client)
(just a fanboi)
Firefox is pretty notorious for leaking memory all over. I'm sure 2.0 is better, and it is a nice browser, but I've seen cases where it eventually wound up consuming nearly all memory available on a system.
Just saying.
Funny you list Firefox as a replacement for "memory hogs"; sounds more like a fan boy point than a accurate fact.
Is upgrading to FF 2.0 from 1.5.0.9
I really have NO issues with my current FF whats to gain?
Any less of a resource eater?
For Windows Desktop Search, what about Mo-Search? I think its great, free and very lightweight: http://www.meauxsoft.com/21701/index.html
Opera is light weight and fast.
However, when it comes to memory consumption, Firefox is a memory hog. In this case IE is better.
Everyone who thinks that FireFox has a mem leak just needs to realize that it is the cache that takes up space. You can limit the max amount of space the cache can take up. Just google it, I don't remember it offhand.
I agree with some people that Firefox can be serious memory hog, if you WANT it to be like that. If you have lot of extensions on ur FFox, ur system can be very slow, I have over 50 of them installed!
trillian is not light weight
forgot http://www.musikcube.com/
Better then foobar imho.
Another good media player that's light on resources would be SysTrayPlay.
http://digitalelement.byethost22.com/stp/
fking opera fanboys
I copied this from my comment on Digg because I thought it might be helpful to lots of folks. You'll find tons of memory sippers and downright small programs on these sites:
http://www.oldversion.com/
http://www.oldapps.com/ (even bigger site than oldversion)
http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/index.html
http://portableapps.com/
http://www.tinyapps.org/
I noticed nobody mentioned µTorrent as a replacement for the memory-hog Azureus. I suppose most Diggers know about that already, but did you know about miniaim? It's the µTorrent of chat clients, weighing in at a very svelte 81k: http://miniaim.net/
VLC is lightweight? Maybe the old versions. The new one it takes ages to load on my system. I now use MPlayer for Windows (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html) with MPUI (http://mpui.sourceforge.net/). Real fast!
I use CoolPlayer for my MP3s it is not heavy on resources and it has an equalizer. and lets face it its COOL.
http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
where is ..Miranda IM, 7zip, or spywareblaster ? :-)
AVG is slow as molasses. Just switched to Avast. Like it alot.
Thanks for the list. Thought it was a pretty decent one. We really need light-weight antivirus. Symantec really kills me. Do you know how Kaspersky handles things?
Why don't we all just use Linux, which is faster and more secure than Windows XP can ever imagine to be (of course, on the same set of hardware configs)? Firefox 2.0 is definitely better than any versions of 1.5... And Kaspersky is infamous for slowness and its pig-like screeching when it finds a virus. But, yeah, Norton and Symantec are huge memory-eaters. Never get Norton; it simply sucks. AVG and Avast! are much more versatile.
Linux? Why don't you change the rotational speed of the earth while you are at?
Seriously man, linux is not ready for the desktop. Not even close, for most users.
and about it being "amazingly faster" ... that's a pretty bug statement. For sure lots of server stuff is rock solid and built much smarter, but to claim that Linux rocks xp in general for performance.... you have to be talking a little out of your ass there.
i limited ff to 1mb cache and it runs pretty sporty. i generally have about 10-20 tabs open.
i found a sweet music player called Billy on Tucows. No frills, plays music with zero lag, zero static and doesn't slow down my box. you can find it at www.sheepfriends.com too. I was so fucking tired of the itunes, mm, wmp bloat.
If I can get them I'd like all my apps to be under 1meg. the bs feature creep drives me nuts.
As somebody else said, Trillian is hardly lightweight. It's more like a ton of bricks. Although it still might be better than gaim.
linux is already on the desktop. it's less of a trouble to install and maintain safe from harm than windows.
linux is better maintained than windows.
linux CAN be faster than windows on the same hardware with minimum effort.
linux is what it is because it follows a
different philosophy from ms windows or apple/mac.
linux does demand a little bit of effort to get windows software to run on it.
linux crashes.
don't confuse the platform for the politics. that is just akin to trolling.
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I like ClamWin, it's quite light compared to norton.
Does annyone else find that Explorer.exe uses about 30-50mbs ram?
I usually close it down if I'm not going to do any file management and want a bit more ram.
Has annyone done a list like this but focusing on Explorer repllacements sucha as Commander etc? I'm still trying to find one which is freeware, lite and doesn't look cheap.
Nod32 is key. It's super stable, lean and mean. Cheap too. The other thing is turn off eye candy if you want to save resources.
Trillian is far from lightweight. Back in the 2.0 and earlier days I would have agreed. It has almost become as bad of bloatware as symantec norton products have evolved into.
Here are two more lightweight softwares:
Gilly Messenger : http://cracksoft.net/
Zoom Media Player :http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/
Some would argue that Firefox is more of a memory hog than IE (especially if you rack up a decent plug-in collection), but otherwise that's a very good list!
No one mentioned SeaMonkey, A Mozilla Browser Suite, Just like FireFox but has built in Web composer, mail & newsgroups, Address book and IRC chat.
www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
I dont think using memory optimizers is a great idea. See http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/41095/41095.html?Ad=1
Great list. Foxit PDF reader rocks, goodbye Acrobat.
I use Snarfer to read RSS feeds. Install is like 350K.
http://www.snarfware.com/
According to my opinion you mentioned some progs which heavily rely on memory. Trillian and AVG. I do not know about the others though. Just a few days ago there was a digg article mentioning especially trillian as a memory hog.
What about the new Windows Live One Care? How does that stack up?
M'friend, do you know about Clamwin, an open source antivirus?
AVG is cool, but I think that only Open Source software can deal with virii, because after the Sony Music CD Rootkit scandal it is clear that commercial software that nobody knows how they operate treat security threats from major corporations as features rather than danger.
Its funny to see the linux hating comments , most of those must be from 12 year old gamers or people who havent tried linux since the 90's
Yed, linux iss easier to use than windows, when you are used to it.
At the begining, I find it horible, but after one year, I can't use windows anymore, that's realy to complicated...
And about firefox : It is realy beter under linux than windows, here, it's not a memroy hog :)
Someone knows a defrager software for M$ free, fast and good
free Active Virus Shiled from AOL has lower memory footprint ... http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav/index.adp?
all adobe products are ravenous memory hogs. I dont know why everyone uses em, there are so many better alternatives.
nod32 is the shit btw. Beats everything else hands down.
I am despising spywaredoctor for its memory usage and slugishness, but it is the best out there.
firefox has a known memory leak where it doesn't release cache. ever. even AFTER you close the tabs/windows that contained these pages. this has not been fixed in 2.0. why why why do i need to restart firefox on a regular basis? second, trillian is just as much as a hog as msn, yahoo, aim, et al. gaim or miranda are your best bets
Opera IS a memory hogs to!But It's just so good that I have to use it and would never trade it!
At the moment opera is using 510Mb of memory on my system!
You could always try out "AvaFind" - a Desktop search tool -- DAMN fast, just press Shift + Esc and start searching. Its got dynamic search queries, so no need to press "SEARCH" or whatever -- just keep typing the file name and you'll know where its at. A MUST HAVE software
One of the things that i find helps the most is 4 10K RPM HDD's in Raid0 with 4 gigs of ram.
Free Windows Programs under 2 MB:
http://revision3.com/forum/showthread.php?t=687
Firefox (which is my browser of choice) is not a memory saver. Since buying a cheap, everyday, second-hand PC on eBay (PIII, 800 MHz) I've come to notice this. I'm looking for a an alternative that lets me block ads and alter site content using CSS (Opera's user.js is way too clunky and slow compared to using the Stylish and Adblock extensions).
I remember AVG and Avast being pretty slow alternatives to Norton et al, but Foxit is a true lightweight star compared to the beast that is Acrobat Reader. I'm also finding Mediamonkey an excellent, reasonably quick alternative to iTunes (and it works with my iPod), while Media Player UI is an excellent video player. Gimpshop and irfanview are also fast and free.
miniaim.net
windows based aim. most space it'd take up is 81k. if you don't want a fancy interface and something simple to use, this is a great IM.
=D
that's all i can think of at the moment
Check out www.tiddlywiki.org for lightweight content sharing. It's lightweight, since it's a single HTML file!
This may have already been noted, but in the about:config for firefox you can decrease it's memory usage by lowering the number. It's default is to use how ever much it needs, whenever.
Does anyone know a Lightweight Word Processor that actually works, is not slow and has full-screen?
Tried a bunch and they're not great.
Writer alone from OOO is 230mb!
If you take one thing away from this post, readers, make it nod32. It's simply amazing.
And Foxit. God, did I almost piss myself when I found Foxit.
Abiword..
That Free RAM XP Pro is total crap.
For lightweight word processors, AbiWord is my fav. Simple, fast, with full-screen mode, reads word docs, very low memory usage.
Re: firefox ... just set the memory to a lower amount.
Re: linux ... much lower memory usage on my system than XP, and certainly lower than Vista.
Well, I'm using aim 6 right now and it's using 14,668K. That's 68K higher than explorer.exe at 14,600K.
Gaim has taken over 50K on my system, I swore off it after the recent reformat and the only thing I miss is the nicer logging and the swifter performance. But i'm not a huge IM hog; I don't run multiple networks at the same time. Just AIM and Skype for me.
So I wouldn't recommend Gaim as a 'lite' option UNLESS you're used to IMing on MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and umpteen other networks all simultaneously since while minimized all three messengers combined take up less memory than a minimized gAim client (if i recall correctly)
Anonymous said...
Someone knows a defrager software for M$ free, fast and good
Power Defragmenter GUI is free - dunno about fast, it is very effective however
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Trillian definitely is very slow. FF memory eating can be limited, look in about:config. Also if you install 50 extensions it will eat memory. You have to pay for features :) And it is hard to compare IE vs FF+50extensions. Who win here? ;)
RE:"Does anyone know a Lightweight Word Processor that actually works, is not slow and has full-screen?"
Notepad.
You should add Zone Alarm to the firewall listing.
You can also use ImgBurn as an alternative to Nero Burning ROM and Adaptec Easy CD Creator.
It's very small in size (about 1.5 MB) and it uses less memory than Nero and Adaptec.
And it's FREE...
Winamp Lite.
Thanks for this great list, looking to swap some of my programs to these pretty soon
as for the antivirus, i think the best one to use is NOD32. constantly being rated among the top 3 and use vey very min memory to run.
Thanks for composing the reference list for me! :]
[E]
hey for PDF Creation,
u can try primo pdf too its good..
http://www.primopdf.com/
JKdefrag Gui is great and free. http://www.emro.nl/freeware/ out performs alot of commercial defraggers.
This is something that I will find very useful, thanks!
html to pdf
Thank you for the selective information you have distributed
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