Five Applications that Don't Suck to Replace Ones that Do

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
From our front-page news:
To be heard, you sometimes need to be blunt, and Download Squad is just that. According to them, the applications you use suck, but it's alright, because they have five alternatives for the five said applications that reek of garbage.

Of course, moving to a free application doesn't mean much if the application itself sucks, but their choice of five don't. Run the ultra-bloated Nero? Ever consider CD Burner XP instead? I admit that Nero is a little bloated, but there are a few features found there not found in CD Burner XP, which is why I continue to use it. I admit though, CD Burner XP is tempting, in all it's lightweight glory.

Another recommendation is replacing Adobe Reader with Foxit PDF Reader... and this is one I can whole heartily agree with. I don't mind Adobe Reader for the most part (it's even more of a pain when you are running the full-blown commercial version), but the incessant update nag screens is what causes me to move my chair back so I don't throw a monitor. "Do you want to shut down all Adobe applications and continue with the update?" Yeah! In fact I was hoping for that! In all seriousness though, their five recommendations are great, and free, so check them out.

cd_burner_xp_main_screen_080508.jpg

I'd wager that you can open and close Foxit about half a dozen times before Reader finishes launching once. It's 92% smaller and still manages to render PDFs very accurately. What more can you say? A PDF reader should, well, read PDFs. It doesn't need to do any other fancy crap.


Source: Download Squad
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
CD Burner seems pretty good, giving it a try. My copy of Nero 7 doesn't work with SATA burners under XP, and will cause the most spectacular crash with Vista after install. You can't even uninstall it as that will also always cause the crash.

I use WinRAR for all my archive and ISO needs. I like the error checking and built in throughput bench test.

Been a long time user of FoxitReader... the non-free version is a really good PDF editor too.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Not sure if you noticed Merlin, but Window's built-in zip-handling is obscenely slow... so useless.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Used CD BurnerXP for awhile, have to say it is free for a reason. I'm playing around with the trial version of Alcohol 120 now, to many issues with Nero and Vista so I'm running out of options.

With CD Burner I burned two audio discs to play while commuting (I have an mp3 player + transmitter, but no free radio bands here to get a clean signal). One of them with my Quadcore and disk idle and the other with some tasks running... both had sound artifacts, pops, and skips.

I also burned a couple data DVDs to send to a friend that has something like an 8GB bandwidth cap on his satallite internet line... burned fine on this end, but according to him one of the demo files was corrupted. Wasn't happy about that...
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Thanks for the update man... and it's too bad that that application didn't live up to expectations. If I used Windows on a regular basis, I'd give it an install and see if my experience matches... but alas, the only two Windows machines hooked up now are for benchmarking :-/

It's too bad... there is quite a bit of selection for Linux that work well. I've been using k3b for quite a number of years and it's never screwed with me. I'd love to know what's available for Windows though, because there's no question that there must be a hundred good burning applications out there that don't suck.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Well, I never had a bad disc, corrupted data, or buffer overuns using Nero... for XP. I loved it, and I was happy that I could elect to only install the base program and avoid the rest of their bundled junk.

Nero and Vista on the other hand seem to work as well as oil and water. Not burned anything yet, but can say Alcohol's disc mounting program is pretty good. :)
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Heh, I might have set myself up, since I ended up needing to use the application on Fri. I had an HDD issue on Thurs night, so I burned a recovery utility to a CD using that app and had no issues at all. It was fast and the disk worked well (I had to use it all day, heh, not one quirk).

I was talking to a friend and he also said that the program can be skecthy though. He said it didn't work the first time he tried it, but did work the second time.

I agree with Nero though, which is why I use the version for Linux more than k3b... it's just more reliable.
 
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