With more and more applications becoming deployable without the use of an installer (i.e. PortableApps and the like), you may wonder which option is best. After all, why install it if you don’t have to as this will surely clutter your system, right? As with just about any computer question, the answer is “it depends”.

Take 7-Zip for example which is available as a traditional installable application or a portable executable. Personally, I make extensive use of the shell integration (right-click menu options) 7-Zip offers, so I would go with the installable version. While this is personal preference, I would not want a program which is not “installed” making shell action entries in my registry for the simple reason that if I remove the program I would expect the uninstaller to clean up these entries. Notepad++ is another example which I would drop into this category.

On the other hand, a relatively flat program such as KeePass I would have no problem running the portable version. To my knowledge, this program does not modify any system settings other than an association with its data files (which I can live without). Also by running the portable version, you would not have the Start Menu entries and if the program supports auto updating, this may not work.

Again, it really boils down to personal preference. If you have any rules or factors which determine the deployment model you prefer, please share.

Software bloat is unfortunately all too common in many of the apps that we use, with two of the biggest offenders being email clients and instant messaging programs. While it’s true you could use web-enabled versions of these apps, sometimes this is just as bad because it causes the browser (no matter which you use) to use a lot of memory in short order.

If you’re willing to sacrifice a few features, here are a few apps that are super slim, super trim and barely take up any memory.

AIM Lite (Instant Messaging)
Link: http://x.aim.com/laim/

I use this personally. It surprisingly supports a lot of AIM features (including linking AIM accounts), basic video and sound and a few other things.

The best part is how little memory it uses. When idling it stays around 6,000K and at most fattens up to 12,000K.

To put this in perspective, most other IM programs will eat up at least 25,000K just sitting there doing nothing with no IM windows open.

TerrAIM (Instant Messaging)
Link: http://www.terraim.com

TerrAIM is the only AIM/ICQ client I know of that requires no installation whatsoever. It’s nothing but a single executable file. Run it and go. It idles at around 8,000K and doesn’t fatten up much larger than that.

The app is ugly by default (white text on black background with orange about the client), but fortunately there are simple themes you can download to make it look "normal", as in black-on-white.

The beauty of TerrAIM is that it could run completely from a USB stick with absolutely no problems whatsoever. One of the options in its preferences is "Save settings in a file rather than registry". What this means is that a small .ini file is written where the .exe is. All that’s requires is that both files are in the same directory.

Lastly, this client may not do multiple accounts, however, you can launch as many instances of the .exe as you want to connect to multiple accounts that way.

It doesn’t get much better than this for simple and light.

Miranda (Instant Messaging)
Link: http://www.miranda-im.org

I do believe this is the lightest multi-protocol IM client there is. It supports a ton of them. On first install it will do AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber (Google Talk), Gadu-Gadu, IRC and MSN (Windows Live). From the addons area you can find just about any other IM protocol on the planet.

Miranda has two versions of its client, unicode and ANSI. The unicode is for Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7, the ANSI for Windows 95/98/ME.

Miranda usually idles around 6,000K and usually doesn’t go past 10,000K. It is very slim on system resource use.

Microsoft Outlook Express 6 (Email)
Link: None, you already have it if you have Windows XP.

OE6 may be old and woefully obsolete, but it’s light. Being that mail is stored using individual EML files instead of a big honkin’ PST in the full Outlook version, this actually makes the client quite speedy.

You can store thousands of mails in OE6 and it doesn’t skip a beat. It works fine for IMAP and POP. The interface is simple, easy and friendly.

Possibly the only knock against OE6 is the lack of spam control; it has none. Your only option is to set up Message Rules per account or use a third-party spam utility, of which there are many.

Alpine (Email)
Link: http://www.washington.edu/alpine/acquire/

Those who have been using the internet long enough remember PINE, and some wish there were a modern(ish) variant of it for Windows. There is. It’s called Alpine.

Alpine is ugly and purposely done terminal-style. It does POP and IMAP, but it’s best suited for IMAP. It can also be used as a newsgroup reader.

For those of you thinking, "Does it do IMAP-enabled Gmail?", yes it does. But I strongly suggest you read these instructions if you want to give it a go. Read them before installing Alpine. Don’t worry, it’s not difficult. Not in the slightest. Just follow the dots, so to speak.

Sylpheed (Email)
Link: http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

I first used Sylpheed in Linux and for a GUI-based mail client it’s very light. Sylpheed harkens back to the way Netscape Mail used to work, except packed with a lot more features, such as Junk mail control, multilingual support and a lot more. Don’t let the simple interface fool you, this client can do the job and do it well.

Claws Mail (Email)
Link: http://www.claws-mail.org/

This client can be run on many different OSes, Windows included. At first glance, Claws Mail sort of looks like a mashup between Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution, but make no mistake, it is its own client and is packed with features.

Honorable mentions

Mozilla Thunderbird (Email)
Link: http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird

Thunderbird is a great mail client and I use it myself – but I can’t count it as light. It is a bit chunky on resource. When idling it takes around 50,000K when used in Windows XP. Granted, Microsoft Outlook (full version, not express) takes up way more memory than that, but for a freebie I wish t-bird were a bit lighter.

aMSN (Instant Messaging)
Link: http://www.amsn-project.net/

This is for connectivity to the Windows Live messaging service, a.k.a. MSN. Nice client and all but could be a bit lighter. aMSN’s best feature is that the Windows and Linux versions are almost identical to each other – and that’s good.

Pidgin (Instant Messaging)
Link: http://www.pidgin.im

Pidgin is one of the best multi-protocol messengers that exists. It connects to everything and it’s easy. But it’s gained weight over the years and lost its lightweight status some time ago. It’s not nearly as chunky as others but it used to be less memory intensive.

Opera Mail (Email)
Link: http://www.opera.com/mail/

The email client within the Opera web browser is seriously good. Once you get past configuring an account (the hardest part) it’s super-easy to get along with. The only problem is that Opera is a modern web browser and like its counterparts takes up a bit too much memory to be considered light.

What do you use that’s light and speedy?

Let us know in the comments. Even if what you use is Linux and not Windows, chime in anyway.

A very easy way to add some ‘pizazz’ to your Windows installation is to install a dock application to launch your programs and documents. I have written about one previously, but another to turn your attention to is the open source Circle Dock.

Circle Dock offers everything you would expect from a dock application in that you can add as many programs and applications as you like, drag and drop, rearrage, etc. (you can read the full list on their web site), but one cool feature is to dock is made available on-demand through either a hotkey or by clicking the middle mouse button. Additionally, the circle design makes this an ideal way to launch your most commonly used items quickly as they can be made placed on the inside ring of items while the less commonly used ones are available on the outside rings.

While a dock really doesn’t add functionality, they are a fun way to ’spice up’ your day to day Windows usage.

Literally defined, a "killer application" a.k.a. a "killer app" is software that is revolutionary and popular (must be both).

In layman’s terms, a killer app is the software giving you the reason to use a computer (or possibly a specific computer) in the first place.

The history of killer apps basically have two generations, that being pre-internet and post-internet.

Pre-internet

In the days where personal computers didn’t connect to any outside networks (other than BBSes), there were two primary applications people used at home. The word processor and the spreadsheet application.

When most people think of word processing they think of Microsoft Word. However this was not the "big" word processing app back then. Most people at home used WordPerfect. And being that this was in DOS it looked rather terrible because there wasn’t any WYSIWYG. But it did work and work well. If not WordPerfect they used an app called Text in DeskMate.

The Apple Lisa (predecessor to the Macintosh) did in fact have a word processor with WYSIWYG called LisaWrite. However few people owned the Lisa machine because it was geared towards business customers and cost $10,000 for the system.

In the word of spreadsheets most people think of Microsoft Excel, but the killer app in pre-internet days was Lotus 1-2-3. On Apple systems as well as other 8-bit systems the popular spreadsheet app was VisiCalc.

A primary effort was put on publishing and home business in pre-internet times, because said honestly there wasn’t much else you could do with a personal computer unless you were a programmer.

Post-internet

The primary application, that being the killer app, in post-internet times is something you’re probably using right now – the web browser.

The web browser by itself does nothing. It literally is a software version of the yesteryear dumb terminal. Without internet connectivity it is useless. But with connectivity it is your gateway to the internet – just like a dumb terminal is useless without its connectivity.

There has been nothing introduced to computers since the web browser that qualifies as the application people use most on their computers from the moment they turn them on. It has even superseded word processing and spreadsheet applications as most-used.

When you think about it, is there an app you use more than a web browser? Probably not.

Additionally, all the spreadsheet’ing and word processing you do can be done via the web browser. This "dumb" software is the one tool you cannot possibly be without if you use a computer at all.

The future

What will the next killer app be? Hard to say.

But what is being said right now – and has been said for quite a while – is that web browsers are still rather terrible and desperately need to change.

Google Chrome is an example of what direction the internet might be heading towards. The direction it indicates is both cool and scary and the same time.

The cool part: It is a browser that works near-perfectly with services provided by the #1 web site in the world.

The scary part: It heavily leans towards a proprietary internet that shuts out other sites in one fell swoop. Granted, nothing works better than proprietary software – but that’s not what the internet is about.

It’ll be interesting, no doubt there.

Text editors are obviously not very exciting in the world of computers, however there are times when they’re absolutely necessary to get things done. For example, if you have ever dabbled in programming, used HTML, custom-made your own Cascading Style Sheet or the like, an advanced and fast text editor is required otherwise it takes twice as long to get things done.

For Windows there is no better text editor than Notepad++ (pronounced as it looks: “Notepad Plus Plus”). Once you start using it you’ll never use plain ol’ Windows Notepad ever again.

There are many perks to using Notepad++. Here’s a few of them:

• Syntax highlighting (color coding for specific programming languages)
• WYSIWYG
• Auto-completion
• Multi-document environment (as in tabs)
• Drag’n'drop support
• Zoom in/out
• Macro record/playback

There’s a lot more that this editor can do but you get the idea.

You can download Notepad++ from here. It’s free and ready to rock.