UPDATED ON: 2024-09-18 NOTE: list will be updated in the future [final renewal is planned somewhere around 2028]. List of essential software needed for smooth and hassle free system performance. I use these applications on a daily basis. Selection is really private, but nevertheless of this fact I want to share my knowledge with you. List doesn’t contain any microsoft or adobe products. Sorted by usage frequency. Also i’ll do my best to provide final Windows 7 compatible versions of software.

Relaxed melancholic composition delivered by very interesting [retro hardware yt-vlogger] . And his [personal page] in case you want to know. Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

DON'T EVEN THINK THAT WINDOWS 7 IS DEAD! Official extended support for Windows 7 operating system [ended on January 14, 2020] . Home users can’t extend support for the operating system while business and enterprise customers may extend support by up to three years [till January 14, 2023] , to be precise. This is done by joining the ESU program which is available per machine [business] or per user [enterprise].

Here is a short breakdown of the most frequently used commands, which could be launched from the START menu. [WIN] + R ► START ► RUN ► …. CONTROL PANEL control panel LAN CONNECTIONS ncpa.cpl REMOTE DESKTOP mstsc SYSTEM SERVICES services.msc USER CONTROL PANEL control userpasswords2 MICROSOFT CONFIG TOOL msconfig DIRECTX DIAGNOSTICS TOOL dxdiag SYSTEM INFORMATION msinfo32 REGISTRY EDITOR regedit TASK SCHEDULER taskschd.msc GROUP POLICY EDITOR gpedit.msc Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

My favorite game of all times. Thanks to it I’ve learn English [to some kind of degree] and even was almost expelled from university. What a neat memories. I was totally obsessed with deep “in game” atmosphere. Cyberpunk post-apocalyptic stuff, you know what I’m saying and those incredible ambient from master [Mark Morgan] . Can firmly confirm that modern series of this franchise don’t provide such immersion. As for backdrop music, Mark Morgan in Fallout ½ set quality bar to unreachable level.

UPDATE 2021-10-11: Added Excellent [APKGrabber] ▓ ALTERNATIVE FIRMWARE As for firmware, I recommend to use [LineAgeOS] if your device is supported. Neat FW with minimal tracking and no bloat from big corps. If there is no native LineAgeOS support check [XDA forum threads] for unofficial ports by community enthusiasts. If your device is not supported in both cases I do not recommend to update stock firmware to prevent bloat’n’telemetry installation.

The roots of bench-marking tools come from [Demoscene] .
The most quality products were crafted by Finnish and Russian coders.
Here is a little breakdown of most notable benchmarks just for your convenience.

Three the most glorious moments of the whole [comedy] . Especially i like how Marv is doing cool break dance. Always splitting my sides with laughter. MARV DOING BREAK-DANCE MARV GETS ELECTROCUTED HARRY BEING EXPLODED [700% SLOW-MO] «div class=“demo_line_two_stock_links”> Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

One of my favorite cartoons ever. The reality is like: current gen Z is even dumber than B’n’B. Who would have thought that such thing could turn out like this? Some time ago I have compiled the best moments of this awesome cartoon. Hosted on Brighteon video service. Following content belong to Mike Judge. BEST CUTS OF BEAVIS’N’BUTT-HEAD DIRECT LINK THE BEST BEAVIS HYSTERICS DIRECT LINK BEAVIS’N’BUTT-HEAD ARE DREAMING DIRECT LINK BEAVIS&BUTT-HEAD IN DEEP COMA [~4HOUR OF DEEP SLEEPING] DIRECT LINK Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

UPDATED ON: 2024-09-11

List will be updated in the future.
Most of the applications can be found on [F-Droid market] and work on Android 8.0.
Permissions checker: [Exodus] .

Note: Don’t worry, your eye sight is ok. I’m just testing CRT-emulation mode via CSS-magic. To remove FX click on any other page. Back in Pentium 66Mhz days I was a follower of minimal design and always turned off all fancy graphical beauties, for the sake of performance of course. However, today we are not limited to 8Megs of RAM anymore. Therefore, I have decided to transform my Windows 7 installation into Windows Vista.

Probably one of the best pure 100% ambient albums in human history. Well-crafted multi-layered textures deeply stimulate ear channels and bring your consciousness to the outer limits of our existence. Effect of presence is unparalleled. You do not even need motion video footage to feel the third dimension. More than good earphones are highly recommended. Low-quality audio sample can be found on YT. [CONSIDER TO PURCHASE IT] Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

It’s just incredible how creative were people in 90s. This one will be remembered for sure. Posting to make sure that all of you make a note of it.

UPDATED: 2021-10-05 Some good old-school sites regarding ‘puters and technology. I will update this post when stumble upon something very cool. [Razorback95] ► cool guy doing retro stuff [DXZeff] ► small vintage computer forum, also guy has pretty neat YT channel [Retro revival blog] ► excellent selection of vintage software [Vogons forum] ► the most important place for old school gamers [Old-games.ru portal] ► very vibrant old games Russian community

Software is not perfect. Windows, Linux or any other OS. It doesn’t really matter. In this quick note, I will talk about Windows operating system. For basic deleting of stucked files big chance that you are already using utility like Unlocker or smth. However, some time ago Unlocker was caught in spreading malware, so no trust to this application anymore. As for me, I prefer [Lock Hunter] instead. And what about frozen processes?

Even mighty Windows 7 comes with preinstalled junk. Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Microsoft.
In this posting I’ll point you out some bloated stuff, that don’t need regular home user on normal basis.
All of these should be removed to save your disk space and improve system performance.

As you may already know [I like to do landscape and industrial photography] . But when taking plain pictures don’t fun me enough I’m doing simple 3D graphics in Blender. Not long ago I have discovered [Terragen] software. Software can produce pretty good terrain landscapes. Here are my results, hope that you’ll find them entertaining. I’ve tried to keep the picuture size small, not to generate big traffic. Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

For some time I’ve owned Asus Essense STX II sound-card with cool hardware internals, but sh#t-like drivers. Very common situation for modern reality. Except the fact that card is not so modern at all. Asus dropped [driver support] for Windows 7 @ 2015. How cool is that? After some web searching I’ve stumbled upon [Maxedtech drivers] . The overall quality is better, some bugs are fixed, some appeared, but even at this point was not satisfied with system stability.

Quick breakdown of the most powerful AMD-based cards for legacy operating systems. [X850XT PE] ► WINDOWS 98 [official drivers] / Omega drivers ] [HD 3870 X 2] ► WINDOWS 2000 [official drivers] plus some INF tinkering, will review that one later on [HD 5970] ► WINDOWS 2000 [Blackwingcat hacks] [R9 270X] ► WINDOWS XP [official drivers] [6950XT] ► WINDOWS 7 [official drivers] ◄ currently rocking on that one under Windows 7 wing.

In early 90s, during days of light-hearted childhood, I used to own [Gravis Ultrasound Max] ► cool wave-table based audio card. Pretty strong rival to [Sound Blaster from Creative Labs] . Card held nice instruments in its RAM and was gooood at playing Midi files. Signal-to-noise ratio was better than in Sound Blaster, but card struggle to compete with [Pro Audio Spectrum 16] . It’s a pity that I don’t own card anymore and that is why can’t do quality pictures of it.

Do we really need expensive Sennheiser? In youth dates, I was fond of exploiting expensive audio technics.As for earphones, my favorite brand was Bayerdynamic. However, some time ago I have discovered relatively inexpensive headphones from Chinese brand [Fiio] . As a listener of wide gamut of music like ambient, trance, dub, psybient, jazz, metal: I have to say that this headphones provide totally unexpected level of audio quality. Especially if we’ll consider the price.

Of course you run into situations when you would like to copy “non-standard” files to your Android smartphone and dumb MTP protocol showed up window like this one: And this torture repeated after every new file type copied. Such imbecility can be removed by following command in admin console: regsvr32 /u wpdshext.dll That’s all, limitation is gone. Another hint, which potentially can help to overcome weird design of MTP protocol.

I think that people are sicking tired of cheap computer graphics. Everything is so plastic and unnaturally glossy these days. Miss those real video effects from early 90s. And yeah, they were so atmospheric, especially amplified effect of beam light coming out of backdrop. Evil Dead is very neat example, just look at these pieces. Make sure to watch S-Mart scene! Evil Dead I Ending Scene Evil Dead ][ Cabin Run Evil Dead ][ Ending Scene Evil Dead ]I[ S-Mart End BLOG UPDATE ► full theme refactoring, made it more 90’ish, RGB and stuff, you know what i’m saying, fixed some issues

Sometime ago i had YT channel with best [tracker MODS] ever. When i’ve reached almost 10.000 of subs i was permanently banned, without any strikes on copyrighted content. Anyways, I was posting content under terms of “fair use”. Today i’ve decided to revive the channel on new platform and in a bit different wrapping - 60 sec loops instead of posting whole tracks. I don’t like TT too much, but want to try it out.

Straight’n’essential advice: do not use google, yahoo, bing, yandex, rambler or mail.ru. More trust goes out to [DuckDuckGo] . However, even they have not so good reputation if we look into the past dealings with Yahoo. Use [StartPage] if you want to get results similar to google, but beware that they are not exactly the same. Startpage removes some stuff and adds some of it’s own. In general, it is proxy to google with so-called de-anonymized search queries.

The Hackers [1995] - I hope you don't screw like you type. - It has a killer refresh rate. - P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium. - It's not just the chip. It has a PCI bus. - But... you knew that. Another qoute, which i remembered for life. - It's got a 28.8 bps modem. - Yeah? Display? - Active matrix. - A million psychedelic colours. Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

For the last 10 years Russian government [and not only Russian] had taken vector to oppress any free speech, which was so generic for internet communities of 90s. Many sites were blocked. Information portals, torrent trackers and even some news microstock sites, like [Alamy] were banned. In current situation i can only suggest to use [Tor Browser] or free VPN services. In case of TOR you trust your traffic to American special services, but doing so you can avoid contact with your local regulators.

Moss: What kind of operating system does it use? Bomb guy: Vista! Moss to Roy: We are going to die! Actually, Vista was not so bad after all these service packs. However, in golden release it was really awful: problems with USB speeds, GUI performance issues and so on. As for looks, I like it soooo much and even [transformed my Windows 7] into Windows Vista. Will post a note regarding this transformation in a while.

UPDATED ON: 2024-01-04 Addons, addons, addons!! So many of them! How to choice the right one? Whom to trust to? I will help you with your findings and share my personal experience. Rule of thumb: do not install too much addons, they will slow down your browser noticeably! ░ SECURITY ADDONS [uMatrix] ► best content blocker ever, even better than uBlock [Github archive] [Ublock Origin] ► an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.

UPDATED ON: 2023-11-23 There are already plenty of excellent articles explaining why [WINDOWS 10] / [WINDOWS 11] IS A COMPLETE SH#T. So, I better be quick not to be pain in the neck or a master of boredom. Essential question: “Why you don’t like modern Windows?” Ah, yeah… one more new link, even better than previous! [A THOUSAND REASONS NOT TO USE WINDOWS 10] ░ DESIGNED BY MARKETING PEOPLE… …not engineers

Excellent guitar-ambient piece from Pink Floyd. …he is a Guitar God. For sure. Can be listened in a loop.