How to make windows suck less part 2 - multimedia.

Right, for whatever reason, you've chosen to buy a windows PC. Bad choice if you ask me,  I'm not you, and we're both glad about that.

First up, you've hardened your computer against spyware by following this advice.  Next, you need to be able to play multimedia files with no problem.

For audio files, you want Media Monkey or iTunes for Windows.  Unless you own an ipod (not a generic MP3 player but one of those things manufactured by Apple), I'd probably go for the former.  If you own an iPod, go for the latter unless your computer literacy is good and you like to troubleshoot.

Video is a different matter.  Video files are complicated.  I once spent a whole two weeks at work getting to the bottom of video file support as part of my job.  At the end of the day the answer is, that the most widely supported video format in the world is VideoCD format.  Pretty much every computer, dvd player, set top box and other magical video-playing-thing can play this format.

But that's not what you want.  You want to be able to play everything.  On a mac, it's simple, install Perian and Flip4Mac.  On linux, it's simple, install mplayer and win32-codecs.  For some reason on windows it's complicated (see the first paragraph of this post).

The first thing you want to do is to remove Windows Media Player.  The advice here is sound, despite the appalling spelling.  The reason you want to remove Windows Media Player is complicated, but the essence is that microsoft is more interested in entering a benificial business relationship with entertainment and media companies than it is in entering a benifical business relationship with you.  Besides WMP doesn't play the most common video formats, so it's best to get rid of it straight away.

As far as the software you can install goes, I hear that the home theatre crowd like Zoomplayer.  I haven't used or even heard of it before, but it's probably worth a try. My own suggestion is to download and install VLC for most media files, and Media Player Classic.  After this, you want save any downloaded files to the desktop, right click on them, select "open with"and then pick any of these programs until you get an idea of which one you like best.

Hope this helps.