general enquiry

[lakshminarayanan]

dear members

this is probably my first posting

happy new year 2006 to all

glad to be a member of the forum of perhaps the best computer magazine of the country.

i have the following general enquiries:

1. which are the best sites for downloading windows freeware ; the best sites for windows xp tricks, tips etc ; and for software articles (like techrepublic.com) and also the best books on windows xp.

2. i have a 2 year old pc with P-4 1.8 GHZ processor, 40 GB HDD and 384 MB DDR RAM. i am not a gamer or a power user. is there any need for any immediate upgradation? i now run win xp with SP 2 without any hiccups (as of now - who knows what will happen the next moment?)

3. i have the original cd of xandros linux. in the considered opinion, could i consider changing over to linux? is it difficult to find softwares and drivers for linux?

4. what is autopatcher for xp? is it wise to instal it?

5. is there any general list of software any user should have on a windows based pc? i know of some lists like techsupportalert.com, anova.org/software but i wish to know if there any other such lists.

thanks for going through this (lousy) posting and hoping to get nice replies.

[yrana2002]

Ans.1: You can simply search this site. It has been discussed many times.
Or you can go to www.download.com or have a search at www.thefreesite.com

Ans.2: You do need to upgrade. There are such a lot of fixes released every 2-3 days, & there are uncountless bugs in OSes that it is a priority. Best way is to keep Automatic Update enabled, which you can do from the Security Center.

Ans.3: Well, get yourself first well acquainted with Windows. Learning linux will become easier then. Drivers are slighly difficult to obtain, you have to go search for them manually, but there are a loads of software around.

Ans.4: It is a tool which updates your pc with the date from wwhich it was released. All hotfixes till now & other soft. upgrades will be installed. It is very safe.

Ans. 5: Check this link :Top Softwares

Hope it was useful.