by Hernani Cerqueira

Created on: July 27, 2009   Last Updated: July 29, 2009

For many, a laptop is an essential tool nowadays, but each owner has their own uses for his laptop, therefore each one of us has his own definition of essential. This article focuses on "software everyone should have in their laptop", meaning generic tools that more or less everyone needs now and then.

PIM Software

Considering the portable nature of a laptop, PIM (Personal Information Manager) software can be of great usage for everyone. There are dozens versions of such software, most of them are commercial, but there are some great Open Source alternatives. I would like to recommend

Thunderbird as an email client and Sunbird for tasks and appointments, but now we have the option to integrate all in one, using Thunderbird and the Lightning add-on. Having our inbox managed through a good email client can have great advantages, such as the possibility to access it offline, more email organization and searching options, or the possibility to integrate multiple accounts in one inbox, and Thunderbird fulfills this job perfectly. Version two offers the option to configure some popular mail services just by filling in our username and password. Besides that, we can use it as an RSS and Newsgroups reader. With Lightning integrated, we can manage tasks and our daily agenda, with all the features we are used to in other PIM software.

Browser

If you use your laptop to surf the web, you obviously need an internet browser. Chances are that there's one installed on your computer by default, but you won't consider your time as wasted if you try some alternatives until you find the one that best suits your needs. Besides Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, you can also give a test drive to Opera or Google Chrome. When you install any of them you'll have the chance to import bookmarks and definitions from the others, so there's no need to lose all that data for the sake of a better browsing experience. And a good browsing experience is fundamental if you do lots of online work, and if at first glance some of the features advertized by modern web browsers will look useless, many of them have the ability to increase your productivity, like tabbed browsing, integrated dictionaries for spell error checking, better bookmarks and history management or multiple profiles. My pick this time goes to Chrome. After I've used for the first time, I found it was exactly what I had made with my Firefox after customizing it with several add-ons, an uncluttered browser, with quick access

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>