I don’t usually like replacing applications I’ve been using for awhile. I get comfortable with them, learn their quirks and have no desire to start that entire process again. However there comes a time when an app you’ve been using for awhile is no longer making the grade or is being out perfomed by another application. At this point you may as well leave your comfort zone and see what else is available on the market for your applications.
Winamp - Has been my favourite audio application for some years now, but currently it seems to be slow, unstable and sluggish. I did like that it was free and could be extended by plugins, but it the last couple of builds have seemed to taken hits performance wise.
Replacement: Musik Cube – I stumbled across Musik Cube this morning when Winamp crashed for the fourth time. Musik cube is very light, fast and does everything you’d expect out of the box. It also supports plugins and the media keys on my keyboard work straight away with no tinkering.
Website: http://www.musikcube.com/
AVG Anti-Virus – Recently forced it’s users to upgrade from version 7 to 8. I found version 8 to be slower, more bloated and the new link search feature destablised both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3 on my machine. I did like how they made the update screen less intrusive, but navigating the control panel was counter intuitive and difficult to find things. Link Search couldnt be disabled without AVG complaining that it wasnt working properly.
Replacement: Avast! – I was a big fan of avg so replacing it was no small task. After searchinig around for a bit I found alot of AVG users had migrated to Avast! I originally wanted to use ClamAV but unfortunately it lacks an on demand scanner, it’s planned for next release so I’ll check it out then. Out of the box I found Avast really irritating, but nearly all of the annoyances can be disabled or turned off. One thing I did notice was that if you’re doing work with files such as defragging you’ll need to disable Avast because it will slow it down considerably. Also the free edition requires manual registration when it expires which is a pain but I usually re-format every few months so that doesnt phase me too much.
Webpage: http://www.avast.com
That’s all the applications I’ve replaced for now, I’m looking into finding a really good general purpose editor for windows (all file types) syntax highlighting, code completion, line numbers, find and replace etc. If you know of one let me know.
