The Starting Point - A Beginners Guide to Bigger Things

The following is provided as a "starting point" for those that are new to the Internet, the use of archived files, or just new to computers in general. Most of you that have been around for years will likely want to pass this page up, though it might at least give you something to think about other than "THE" crack that your looking all over hell for..... and still can't find. :-)

All of the information provided here is based on MY OPINION, ten years experience, and a lot of hard knocks. My only intent is to offer a set of tools for the inexperienced to work with, while forming their own opinions of what they need or want in an application. It sure as hell isn't intended to be the "holy grail" for the experienced user, or the start of some sort of "mines better than yours" debate.The files listed below are what I consider to be required to function on the Internet, or use a computer for that matter. The cracks for several of these programs can be found on the front page of this site.

STOP! Do you have ANTI-VIRUS software on your system? Before going one step further anywhere on the Internet, you need ANTI-VIRUS software. "surfing the net" without virus protection is about the same as reaching over and spanking your brand new P6 4 million giga-hertz baby with a a very large hammer. Immediately go to the following address, download the demo of the current version, install the program, while following directions, and then come back and continue. http://www.mcafee.com I will grant you that this is NOT the very best AV program on the planet, however it is much better than the one that you have installed at the moment. If you choose to continue on the Internet without AV protection, you will eventually find there was a good deal of wisdom in my words. I own a 2 gigabyte paperweight as proof.

A very good text editor is essential. I use UltraEdit which is available at http://www.ultraedit.com it is a damn sight more powerful than anything Microsoft ever produced. You can bet your ass the programmers at MS don't write code with Notepad, Wordpad, or any of that other shit they pack with Windows. With all of the complex HTML creation programs available today, I still use UE for most of my html editing. Works well with nearly all forms of text, converts to UNIX, saves in plain ASCII text, works well with several programming languages, etc.. Get the idea? Get the program.

Obviously if you are doing anything with shareware on the Internet, downloading files, etc. You will be working with files that are packaged with a variety of compression archivers. The most common are ZIP and EXE, the exe's are no problem since they extract and install themselves. The zip's are another story, for this you will need an application to unpack the files. WinZip is the most common and possibly the simplest to use. You can get a demo copy at http://www.winzip.com. You NEED this.

Sooner or later you are likely to encounter what is commonly called "news groups" or Usenet. Though programs that are included with some web browsers and MS Outlook Express do manage to handle this task. The way they do it is far from a thing of beauty. Perhaps the answer for most is a small program that is also freeware. News Express offers a very simple user interface, automatic decoding of several file types, (mp3, jpg and others) There are a ton of news readers available, but I have yet to see one as well suited to a beginner as this one. You can get News Express with a left click here This will at least get you started into the groups, later you can decide IF you need something more powerful. My guess is that this will do well for all but the hardcore news addict. Some of them use it too. :-) In the course of trolling thru the groups, you without a doubt run into files with an .RAR extension. These are files compressed in the RAR format. Open and process these files with WinRAR. You can grab a copy of this by clicking here. A KeyGen for this version of WinRAR (2.50) can be found on the front page of this site. For those willing and able to follow directions there is an excellent setup tutorial for Forte's Agent News Reader, you can get this tutorial by clicking here

Somewhere buried under all the fancy icons and themes of WIN 95/98 still lives a copy of good old MSDOS. There are MANY times that I can still do something alot faster with DOS than I can with Windows. I have used the same utility for navigating about in DOS for years. It is a very small file called LIST.COM, it is also extremely powerful , very quick, runs great on a network, and never crash's anything. You can get a copy of List by clicking here Simply unzip the file into your windows directory, and drop to DOS and type LIST. Put a copy of list.com on your bootable diskette while your at it. What's a boot disk you ask? Grab your manuals and LEARN about this one tonight, tomarrow may be too late. The manuals are all those papers and stuff that came with your computer. <grin>

Bootdisk.Com All those bootable files for OS versions you never really owned. :>

Clean Re-Install Start here if you have never installed an operating system from scratch.

More to Come......As time permits.

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