Grouse's Essential Software List of Doom

[snowgrouse]

These are all my favourite programs for Windows, from XP to Win7. These are just my essential pieces of software--you might prefer different ones, and there are tons of programs that work just as well or better, so these are just my personal picks. I've found all of these pretty damn useful. I've also tried to link to older, less bloated versions

Comments

[rob_t_firefly]

Much love for your softwares, especially PSP9. I adore that thing so much.

[snowgrouse]

It's a handy little thing that I've used for +5 years now. It's so good. After Corel bought them, they just got so bloaty and blah and useless, but it's definitely my favourite way of sorting out my pics. And if you have hundreds of thousands of pics on your HD, it's pretty much invaluable. And Animation Shop was so simple for animated gifs that I used it for ages before grudgingly updating to ImageReady (and now Potatochop) to do my animated icons. It's all great stuff.

[rob_t_firefly]

I started using PSP after downloading the shareware version 3.11 from CompuServe in 1995, and I kept constantly upgrading all the way up to 9. I don't think there's a single other application I've been happily using for that long. *counts the grey hairs*

Corel did butcher the poor thing, didn't they? It was so sad. But as long as PSP9 still boots, I'll keep using it. I actually prefer it to Photoshop and the others, even for pro-grade stuff.

[snowgrouse]

Around ten years ago, I was still resistant to Photoshop just because PSP worked so well for cutting and pasting heads on people and stuff, and it wasn't as complicated as Photoshop. Of course, the images I made were much simpler back then, but it was still nice for some basic manippage and iconage. Corel just bloated it up and made it counter-intuitive, so it became much poorer than some older versions. I still use PSP9 when I have to quickly paste in a screenshot or open an image in a separate application, because Photoshop is not worth opening for small things like that. It's nifty and I love it. (Using my awful old B7 icon for Animation Shop nostalgia...)

[gordon_r_d]

I'm still using the copy of PSP7 I got with a desktop eight years ago for most of my basic stuffs. :)

[snowgrouse]

I'm glad people have so much PSP love! It was the first proper photoediting program I used, because they'd installed it on all our machines at school in the mid-Nineties. It was one of the first programs I got for my first computer in 1999 because I enjoyed it so much. (Funny how most of my memories from that time are from using it to paste Who companions' heads on Playboy scans. *g*)