Create bootable USB drives the easy way
You can use it to flash an ISO for a free operating system instead Microsoft Windows spyware. You could go Linux, or BSD, or Haiku, or whatever so long as your personal data & freedom are respected.
And trusting with closed eyes and giving away control of their computers to that big tech co Having ads And enjoying updates at good moments And having to have an antivirus And paying licenses And having your children learn computing on an environment that they’ll get used to so they’ll have to buy their own when they get older and cope with all this sh*t
Ventoy’s an upgrade from Rufus cuz you can store multiple ISOs in 1usb drive. The limit is the USB storage so you could have 20+ distros.
WUB or Windows Update Blocker.
It’s one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.
It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.
It’s practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.
Windows doesn’t listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it’ll do so without your knowledge.
The best part is that when you’re ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it’s as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.
Does this really work? I have a little windows miniPC that runs some home services. And I hate that it just updates and reboots (or sometimes just ends up shutting down) whenever it’s feels like it. I don’t have the energy at the moment to clear it down and rebuild from scratch with Linux so this update blocker sounds bloody amazing.
I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.
The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.
There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.
It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.
I am an IT guy, as a general rule I don’t install stuff I don’t need.
That being said, we all have different requirenments for our computers, and I would be dumb to enforce my requirenments on you.
So here are some great tools and utillities that I have used and in some cases still use.
Firefox - Google Chrome needs a rival to keep the web happy, it is an excellent browser and have served me well for 20+ years.
VLC - Video Lan Client, I have yet to find a media file that this player can’t play, this is less relevant since piracy have gone down, but I still keep in on my system.
digiKam - A photo organizer, works well with all formats I have thrown at it, currently manages my growing collection of photos (see my profile for a photo I took of a Lynx Kitten), it also makes me able to do light photo editing, but I mainly use Affinity Photo for that.
Strawberry Music Player - An advanced music player, based on Clementine Music Player which is based on amaroK musik player. It gives me a great album interface to managemy music, less usefull now since I buy most of my music through iTunes, but still does an excellent job of managing growing collection och C64/Amiga remixes from remix64.com
Notepad++ - This should be on every windows computer, it is an advanced text editor, it has everything you need from a text editor, plays way more. It is fast, has persistant tabs, syntax highlighting, autocomplete, themes and way more.
VS Code - Visual Studio Code, this is a source code editor, it is like taking Notepad++, making it snort cocaine and bolting a modern interface to it. This is not a general text editor, this is a program where you write and edit code, Notepad++ is excellent for reading and making quick changes to text files, VS Code is what you use to develop the code. It assists you constantly, from autocomplete, to error checking your code, I write a lot of Powershell code in VS Code at work, and it is great. It is slower to get going than Notepad++, but once you start it and have it co figured it works great.
Gimp - The Gnu Image Manipulation Program, free but less refined version of Adobe Photoshop, it is highly capable.
Libre Office, a less refined version of the office suite.
Funny you mention piracy going down, this is absolutely not true lol. Also you should pirate music instead of giving money to apple
Piracy is definitely not in its heyday anymore. Lemmy talks big about piracy going up but I’ve yet to meet someone in person who’s went back to piracy. Most people just jump between streaming platforms every other month.
Ah yes, it’s fine down because YOU haven’t happened to meet anyone who pirates. As of I’d ever pay for streaming platforms lol. I have 18tb+ of media on my plex server
I used most of the stuff you listed though I usually switched to mpv instead of VLC. On Linux, I used Strawberry for quite some time though I use foobar2000 on Windows. Deadbeef is a good lightweight alternative to that on Linux but always seems to play catch up to it’s elder cousin.
Windows has a clipboard tool for caching several different pastes, you may have to turn it on though.
You can use ctrl left/right to jump whole words, this also works with shift to select.
I wouldn’t call that a Windows tool, it’s more a (cross-platform,) second brain featureful note-taking app
