How to make Windows 7 usable

Classic software

• Firefox, UK English: ​http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all.html?lang-search=british
• Chrome, UK English: ​https://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB
• VLC: ​http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html
• GVim: ​http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc
• Gimp: ​http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html
• Inkscape: ​http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en
• Wireshark: ​http://www.wireshark.org/download.html

Usability

• Typical X11 behaviour focus-follows-mouse, no-raise, right-click-sends-back and middle-click-pastes: TXmouse (​http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/nt/TXMouse/); download binary and copy it in Startup folder (possibly for all users)
• compose key: AllChars (​http://sourceforge.net/projects/allchars/files/); unzip and copy .exe to Startup folder (possibly for all users) and *.dll to c:\Windows\system32.
• Disable boot-time numlock: edit registry key InitialKeyboardIndicators and set bit 1 (mask value 2) to 0.

MSYS

• Download installer from ​http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Automated%20MinGW%20Installer/mingw-get-inst/
• Run the installer and optionally select all proposed packages
• Tweaking
  • Edit c:\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\fstab using a text editor and append the following line: c:\Users\ /home (this will make sure MSYS see the proper user directories)
• Git
  • Download and run msysGit (​http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/)
  • Choose the Run Git and included Unix tools from the Windows Command Prompt install option
• Terminal emulator
  • in an MSYS window, run mingw-get update then mingw-get install msys-rxvt