Recommend some programs

I've been using the same programs for a while now, but they are starting to annoy me. Suggest some substitutes:

WinRAR. The splash advert is evil as fuck. I need something free that works on a wide variety of archive files.

Winamp. Back in the day, it was relatively lightweight. Now it takes an eternity to load on my laptop, if it doesn't crash first. Since I need something fast and lightweight for the laptop, suggest something like that.

Opera. You know, I was using Firefox for over a year. Then I tried Opera. I like it. It has a lot of stuff at once. But I'll be damned if it doesn't crash all the time. I'm thinking of going back to FireFox, but is there anything I should know about Opera crashing so I might can solve this myself.

Trillian. I like it, though it may be time for a change for me. Any other good messaging programs out there that support a wide variety of connections at once?

I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything. I just want to use the best programs.

>>1

-Find torrent for winrar corporate, google or whatever.

-Winamp 2,95, why do you need the latest version? The old one is still available at several sites, google will undoubtedly find one. Winamp 2,95 opens without notable delay on my 166Mhz P6 under WinXP - or you can disable modern skinning in new winamp.. which might work good or it might not, I have no clue of the new one as I've used a single winamp version for years now and a single skin for some 7 years. Foobar is supposedly not too hungry either, altho it has much more of an UI than winamp which I find unneccesary for my needs and I am unaware how fast it loads.

-Fix your computer. Or perhaps it is a v9.0 beta? If so, use version 8,5x or try newer beta, that might be stable for you. The betas 1 and 2 has some minor stability issues I have noted on saving images, but it is a beta so you should expect that. Otherwise undoubtedly related to your specific setup and I got not much clue how to fix, I experienced no stability issues with 8,5 only with 9,0 beta 1-2
If you need alternative, why not try IE7 Beta, I hear it stacks up nicely. Other than that, only firefox is left amongst some less popular browsers, for Windows anyways.

Another thing I just remembered, got a netburst Pentium? I had opera hangs sometimes with one of those, however they were not bad enough to require restarting of browser, switching to another tab temporarily unfroze the browser.



-If you enjoy shitty OSShitware that has "decent" UI, try GAIM.If you enjoy minimalist bullshit with abysmally bad UI, try Miranda IM.
Otherwise you mightaswell stick with generic piece of shit, Trillian.

For my low resource system, I personally used GAIM and it ran rather well considering the very limited RAM and processor power available under WinXP.