We must have found ourselves in this situation at least once when we purchased a new PC (or for that matter, formatted the old one) and don’t remember the basic softwares we must have on our PC. If you think you fall into this category quite often, then don’t worry as I will help you with a softwares that you really need on the computer.

1> Antivirus

Lets start with the most practical software in today’s world, the anti-virus. If you don’t have it, you will find yourself formatting or restoring the PC every now and then. So to avoid all this goof-up, the basic thing we need is an anti-virus. Now, you do get free and premium anti-viruses. Well, I advise you’ll to go with the paid one. Not only they are updated more frequently, they also have a hell-lotta features more as compared to the free ones. Choose the free one if you are on a shoestring budget.

My Picks :

Premium Antivirus - Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 (Using KIS for the past 3 years )

Free Antivirus – Avast Home Edition (Backup AV, scan PC once every 2 months with this)

2-> CCleaner

A great tool to keep your PC clean from useless files that clutter your HDD. Just 3 MB in size, this small dynamite is a great software that saves you from the headache of manually deleting useless files. This is a free software, so download it guys

3-> Browsers :

Well, though we get Internet Explorer bundled along with every Microsoft OS, there is some reason why we geeks hate it. Therefore, what we need is a better browser. IMHO, I suggest Chrome. I am using Chrome since the day it was launched for public, and as McDonalds says, “I’m Loving It”. Clean looks, less memory consumption and quickest browser are the features that tilts the favour towards Chrome. If you are a developer, I suggest FireFox. Infact, FireFox can be a better browser than Chrome if they fix the memory consumption a bit.

4-> Media Player

Love watching movies or hearing music for hours together? Then you must have a media player in your possession. Well, the market is flooded with many players and selecting a good one is very difficult. From the tried and tested ones, I feel that VLC Players is one of the best ones available now. If you want to try another one for movies, I suggest KMPlayer. This player can play almost all kinds of extensions available, even the ones that you have never heard of. For music maniacs, I suggest either MediaMonkey or WinAmp, as per their preferences.

5-> Driver Updates

Getting bored to search for updates of all your hardwares? Well, don’t worry since we have the ultimate solution for you.  Purchase Driver Genius Professional Edition and never think about the updates. All you need to do is run the software and it will search for the updates required and install them, as simple as that

6-> Download Managers

When you basically download something, it is downloaded as a whole file. When you download the same thing with a download manager, it automatically get divided into fragments and the manager downloads it. This ensures that you have a quicker download. Well, the 2 leaders in this segment are DAP (Download Accelerator Plus) and IDM (Internet Download Manager). Well, I prefer the latter one as it gives me 4-5 kbps more than the DAP. Well use whatever you prefer since both are really awesome

Using Windows 7 since the past couple of days, I felt it strange that it didn’t have the usual hibernation option. So, I decided to check whether they are completely removed the Hibernation option or it had to be started manually. I tried manually, and it worked

In Windows 7, it is complicated to enable the Hibernation option as compared to XP or Vista. So, we need to do it manually.

Enabling Hibernation In Windows 7 Through Power Options

1. Go to Control Panel and click on Change when the computer sleeps.

After that just click on Choose Advanced Power Settings. This is when the Advanced Settings dialog box will popup. You can notice that in the category there is Sleep and under that is Hibernate. Expand Hibernate and then choose the time period of hibernation

Enable Hibernation In Windows 7 via Command Prompt

1. Go to RUN and type CMD in the dialog box provided.

2. Now type the following command exactly as given :

powercfg.exe /hibernate on

3. To disable hibernation, just use the following command :

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

Use any of the methods to enable it. But I don’t understand the logic of the Microsoft coders to hide such an important update. Hope they make some useful changes in the Service Pack 1.