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A blog by Rob J Hyndman 

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Recommended freeware

Published on 7 June 2010

Today my new Win­dows note­book arrived and I have gone through the process of rein­stalling all my software.  Mostly I use free­ware, not just because it is free but also because most of this soft­ware is bet­ter than any­thing avail­able com­mer­cially. I thought it would be use­ful to update my post on what I’ve installed and what I recommend.

[Last updated: 23 August 2011 to reflect my cur­rent preferences.]

Ninite

The fastest way to down­load and install free­ware is via Ninite. It doesn’t include every­thing, but does cover a wide range of soft­ware which it auto­mat­i­cally down­loads and installs (using defaults) with­out any user inter­ven­tion. It is amaz­ing how much faster this makes it. I installed the fol­low­ing programs.

  • Chrome (my favourite browser — super fast)
  • Fire­fox (the other browser I occa­sion­ally use)
  • Skype (for long-​​distance conversations)
  • Thun­der­bird (which I only use as a backup for my gmail account)
  • iTunes (for music and podcasts)
  • VLC (for play­ing video)
  • Audac­ity (for edit­ing sound files)
  • Picasa (for photos)
  • GIMP (for edit­ing images)
  • Inkscape (for cre­at­ing line draw­ings using vec­tor graphics)
  • OpenOf­fice (so I can read the files some peo­ple send to me)
  • Adobe Reader (which I still use for most pdf reading)
  • Avast (my pre­ferred virus checker)
  • Google Earth (my very favourite way of wast­ing time)
  • CCleaner (for clean­ing up my old files, unin­stalling unwanted pro­grams, edit­ing what pro­grams run at start up, etc.)
  • Recuva (just in case I delete some­thing by mistake)
  • Filezilla (for mov­ing files to one of my websites)
  • Notepad++ (an excel­lent sim­ple text editor)
  • Ever­note (for stor­ing all my notes, book­marks, and every­thing else I don’t want to forget)

All that down­loaded and installed in about 15 min­utes with­out need­ing any of my attention!

Then I installed the fol­low­ing pro­grams which are not part of Ninite.

R

  • R. The stan­dard com­put­ing plat­form for almost all applied sta­tis­ti­cal research these days.
  • Rtools. All the tools needed to develop your own R packages.

LaTeX

  • Mik­TeX. I can­not under­stand why any­one who writes about math­e­mat­ics uses any­thing other than a LaTeX sys­tem. This is the sim­plest install for Windows.
  • TeXs­tu­dio. The best Win­dows text edi­tor for LaTeX and it inter­faces seam­lessly with MiKTeX.

Ref­er­ence database

  • Mende­ley is a great way to keep track of all the papers you are read­ing, and auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate a Bib­TeX file.

Com­puter management

  • Google pack. Lots of use­ful util­i­ties includ­ing Google desk­top (for find­ing files), etc. Many of these are on Ninite, but Gdesk­top isn’t so I still need it.

Bible

  • e-​​sword. For those want­ing an elec­tronic Bible, this is a great resource with zil­lions of add-​​ons. The only has­sle is you have to install every add-​​on separately.

Graph­ics

Util­i­ties

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7 Comments  comments 
  • Manuel

    Great post!! I didn’t know ninite, and I have found it very inter­est­ing. Another good soft­ware that you rec­om­mended before and that I use since that is Mende­ley.
    A ques­tion. Do you use Emacs with R (ESS) or do you pre­fer a sim­ple text edi­tor like notepad++?

    One more thing. I don’t know why but I hav­ing prob­lems to see you web­site cor­rectly with chrome. Some areas in the back­ground are brown.

    Thank you in advance.
    Manuel

    • http://robjhyndman.com Rob J Hyndman

      In my view, Mende­ley still has prob­lems and I’m not rec­om­mend­ing it until they are sorted out. But I expect it will be a great tool when it is ready.

      No, I don’t use Emacs. For R, I use RWinEdt, although notepad++ with the R exten­sion would do much the same thing.

      I’m using chrome on three com­put­ers and my site looks ok on all of them. Can you send me a screen­shot by email?

  • Manuel

    I sent you an email with the screen­shot of your web.
    One ques­tion. What kind of note­book do you use? That is, you do all your work in a note­book or just use it for pre­sen­ta­tions and the ‘hard work’ is done in a desk­top PC.
    I use to work with both, a lap­top and a desk­top but now I am think­ing to by a new lap­top and do all my work on it.

    Hope the screen­shot helps you.

    • http://robjhyndman.com Rob J Hyndman

      I have a desk­top at home and note­book at work. The note­book is con­nected to a dock­ing sta­tion with two mon­i­tors so it feels like a desk­top when I am in my office, but I also use it when travelling.

      My new note­book is an HP Elite­book 8540p with 64 bit Win­dows 7, 16Gb of RAM and an i7 chip. The large RAM is to help R run fast. I need 64bit to be able to han­dle all that RAM.

      The desk­top and note­book are synced using Drop­box so I don’t gen­er­ally take the note­book home each night. It also saves me wor­ry­ing about back­ups or trans­fer­ring files.

  • Manuel

    Hi Rob,
    one ques­tion. I just recently upgrade my lap­top (Lenovo ThinkPad T410) and now I have a 64-​​bit OS. Do you used the 64-​​bit ver­sion of R? Is this ver­sion bet­ter than the 32-​​bit?

    Thank you.