Eight essential netbook utilities you never knew you needed

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5. Real Alternative & QuickTime Alternative

Unless you listen to BBC Radio online or watch a lot of movie trailers, you can probably do without these two multimedia alternatives – but miss out on the net’s entertainment options just because you’re using a netbook?

Both Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative are, obviously, replacements for RealPlayer and Apple QuickTime. Why use them? Well, Real Alternative lets you play RealAudio and RealVideo streams, but dispenses with the glut of unwanted extras that the Real thing insists on infecting your system with. Oh and it installs in a couple of seconds and doesn’t strong-arm you into supplying personal information before you can use it, either.

Apple QuickTime is less insidious (as long as you opt out of Apple Update), but it’s still a bit of a bloater and QuickTime Alternative is a much leaner affair. It plays downloaded .mov files perfectly, but can be a bit hit and miss with QuickTime movies embedded in web pages (and Internet Explorer will keep pestering you install QuickTime, but you don’t use that browser, right..?). We get the most success with 480p HD videos on the Apple Movie Trailers site, incidentally.

6. Media Player Classic

Both Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative come with the open source Media Player Classic as part of their installation bundle, but if you use your netbook for watching video or listening to audio files, it’s worth grabbing even if you don’t install either of those multimedia utilities.

As you can probably guess, Media Player Classic is a media player from the good old days – when applications just did what they were supposed to and were free from countless extra megabytes of useless extra features and ridiculously overblown interfaces. But while it may look just like something from Windows 95, Media Player Classic still stands toe to toe with today’s multimedia monsters, which makes it perfect for netbook use.

7. Xplorer2 Lite

Strictly speaking, Xplorer2 Lite should be on the must-install list for any computer, but it works particularly well on the small screen of a netbook. It’s essentially an update of Windows File Manager, if anyone remembers that relic from Windows 3.1, but that makes it no less indispensable.

Xplorer2 Lite’s multi-tabbed, dual-pane interface manages to provide a comprehensively effective way of working with files without being unnecessarily complicated, and its extensive range of keyboard shortcuts make it quick to use once you’ve learned the ones you need the most.

8. VirtuaWin

Working with more than one window on a small netbook screen is a chore even if you haven’t set the Windows Taskbar to auto-hide, but a virtual Desktop manager makes things an awful lot easier.

Alt+Tab works well enough, but it’s easy to lose track of what each window is for, particularly if you have several windows open for one application. VirtuaWin, on the other hand, lets you separate your windows onto different virtual Desktops, all accessible with a keyboard shortcut. So, could create one Desktop for your word processor, another for your web browser, another – well, you get the idea.

The trick is that the layout of each Desktop, tiles windows and all, is preserved when you switch back and forth, so you can create bespoke Desktop layouts for every task. It’s the next best thing to using multiple monitors – something that anyone using a 1024 x 600 display should appreciate.

So, there you have it – our eight essential netbook applications. Here's a recap:

1. Startup Inspector for Windows
2. Launchy
3. Firefox (netbook optimised version)
4. Foxit Reader
5. Real Alternative & QuickTime Alternative
6. Media Player Classic
7. Xplorer2 Lite
8. VirtualWin

Have we missed any out, or do you know of better alternatives than the ones we suggested? Let us know in the comments.

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