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The 18 Things You Need for Your ComputerMy favorite programs and Web services.

By Farhad ManjooPosted Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008, at 4:54 PM ET

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Harry McCracken reviewed GrandCentral, the service that gives you one phone number for life. Paul Boutin tested out Google Desktop and four other desktop-search programs. Farhad Manjoo explained why he was overjoyed with Google's new browser, Chrome.

Alert Thingy. This desktop app sends you alerts from several online social-networking tools—Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, and soon others. This saves you from loading a Web page to check on each of these services—when you get new Twitters from your friends, they pop up in a little window at the bottom of your screen. You can also send out messages through Alert Thingy, which saves another trip to Twitter.

GrandCentral. This service gives you a single phone number that connects all your phones. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, all your phones (home, work, cell, Skype, etc.) ring—or, depending on rules you can set for the caller or the time of day, a certain subset of the phones ring. It's a great way to manage your voice mail, too—you can have different greetings for different calls, and you can access all your messages through a simple Web interface. The one downside: GrandCentral was purchased by Google in 2007, and it's now limiting the number of new registrations.

Skype. As a journalist, I often need to record my phone calls. When someone calls my GrandCentral number, I answer through Skype (you've got to pay for a Skype phone number to do this; it costs $60 a year). I've also installed a Skype add-on app called PowerGramo to record all my Skype calls. The quality of the recordings is exceptional.

Mint. This is a wonderful Web app for tracking your finances. Tell Mint your bank account and credit card numbers, and it downloads all your statements and categorizes your purchases. It doesn't have as many features as desktop apps like Quicken, but it does seem to identify your purchases more accurately, and because it's online, it enables you to check in on your balance sheet from work and home. Beware: Mint will calculate your "net worth," and sometimes that's not pretty.

Vuze. In this instance, it's probably best not to describe every last detail of what I do on my computer. But if you're looking for a good program for downloading files on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-trading networks, Vuze is the way to go.

Spybot Search & Destroy. Run this Windows-only spyware detector a couple of times to rid your machine of harmful programs that may have installed themselves on your machine without your knowledge. Then, leave Spybot to run in the background—it stays mostly silent, popping up with warning messages only when an app is trying to change your computer's deeper settings. If you give it the go-ahead, Spybot will swat the errant program down.

Synergy. This app has one narrow purpose: It lets you control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse. Say you occasionally run your laptop next to your desktop—move your mouse to the edge of your desktop screen, and suddenly the pointer shows up on your laptop screen. It's like magic—especially since it works between platforms (you can move your mouse from your Mac to your PC).

iTunes. Apple's music software takes way too long to load, but I've found few alternatives that do as good a job at handling a big stash of music. Have you?

Picasa. This photo management program works much like Apple's iPhoto, but it's faster, less prone to crashing, has more features, and is available on Windows (but not on Macs). Plus, it's free.

Microsoft Office 2003. I use Word to write my articles and Excel to track some of my finances. I find them to be much faster and more stable than Web-based productivity apps (like Google Docs) or open-source alternatives like OpenOffice.

That's my list—now show me yours!

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

Plenty of lists, recommendations, and some healthy discussion of security. The point of view below was not shared by others, but seems worth noting.

Comment from the Fray

I won't even list mine--they're antique, half-hearted, disorganized, and mildly intrusive. But I wonder whether effort, intelligence, and time spent dealing with everything on the monitor/ipod/blackberry is actually worth it. I have friends from the dawn of the PC era who spent their days learning every obscure keystroke combinations, and mastered machines that were suddenly obsolete-all that knowledge, now as useless as...well, as the computers themselves. There's a point that many of us reach when we just… refuse, like bad-tempered old mutts, to learn new tricks. It's amazing how much time one saves, how much more orderly your world is, and how productive your disordered and comfortable world becomes.

--John Hazlehurst

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(10/19)

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