Dell are the best value computer systems available. If you add up all the component costs, you'd be hard pressed to get them at ebuyer for any less. The economies of scale (buying power) Dell has makes it practically impossible to beat on price. Add the warranty and the fact that the PC is pre-built you will not find a better value PC deal.

PCbuying list all the latest Dell deals as well as providing objective advice and tips on set up and maintenance on Dell Computers, Laptops and Notebooks. Buying prebuilt Dell computers is the best computer buying advice anyone can give you.

Home

Setting up your Dell (or any pre-built PC).

Dell PCs come with a number of useless applications. You can start by getting rid of the Tiscali and BT Internet applications. The McAffee trial is useless. That just slows down your PC. I get rid of all trial software. The exception is of course if you bought a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office.

List of free software to install in roughly the order you should install them. All programs work with Vista.

AVG free edition. Free for home use. If you are going to use it for commercial purposes you do have to buy the full version. Its still good value.

Google Pack. This is a nice collection of free applications. I download everything apart from Skype, Norton Security Scan and Google talk. So that leaves, Google Toolbar, Spyware doctor starter edition, Google Desktop, Picasa, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Adobe Reader, Real Player and Star Office. I prefer Star Office to Open Office because the former is included in Google pack, whereas the latter isn't. I don't believe there is much difference between the two.

A zip program. My favourites are 7-zip and filzip. 7-Zip is probably the most powerful but I find filzip ever so slightly easier to use. There's no need to buy winzip or winrar which are good zip programs but aren't free.

A graphics editor. My program of choice is paint.net. Its not got all the bells and whistles of Photoshop but its free and OK for most peoples' uses.

A media player. Windows media player is fine for most standard things. I prefer VLC player though. It seems to play every type of video file.

A codec pack. Media players need codecs to play avi and mpeg files. K codec pack is the one I use.

That should be enough for most people. Below are my choice of other programs that are useful for more advance users. All are free and can be used for commercial use.

Filezilla, free FTP program. OK for commercial use.Good alternative to the windows explorer FTP,

PrimoPDF, great for creating PDFs, free and works with Vista. Good alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

Textpad (not free) but gives you a fully functional version which just pops up a reminder to buy. Its only £18 or so to buy so if it bothers you its not too expensive to buy. Jedit is my second choice editor. Its the only text editor I know of that has a tag matching. Very handy for hand coding html.

Azureus 3.0 - my bit torrent client of choice.

Free download manager. If you are regularly downloading files this is a handy application for speeding up download. For rapidshare, megaupload, etc I do prefer Rap Get FDM seems to have problems with some rapidshare files.

Syndicate

Syndicate content
© 2008 Pcbuying.co.uk All rights reserved
sfy39587f11