
Ask HN: What old, discontinued desktop software do you still run? - open-source-ux
What are your reasons for running it?<p>Is it because you&#x27;ve never found a superior alternative?<p>Is it because you know it inside out and it&#x27;s the fastest way to do a task?<p>Is it because it runs fast and with low-memory requirements?<p>Or is it because it has the best interface for what you need to do, and it&#x27;s never been bettered (in your view)?
======
kdamica
Winamp 5.1. The last great version of Winamp, released in 2005. After this
version, they added lots of junk that reduced speed and usability.

~~~
romanovcode
I totally agree that this is the last version of Winamp that was great and I
love this program.

However are many people have mp3 files on their computers? Everyone I know
just uses Spotify or similar tools nowadays and nobody stores actual files on
their computers.

~~~
Vaskivo
I download everything. And much of the music I hear is videogame soundtracks
or stuff from bandcamp and soundcloud. (OK, I listen from streamed music from
soundcloud. But I don't use spotify)

------
RUG3Y
Windows 7 - I like to play games occasionally but I think Windows 10 is trash,
I hate MS spying and advertising in my start menu, etc.

~~~
Kuraj
Do you keep it up to date? Because I'm afraid MS has backported the spying
part.

~~~
RUG3Y
I have updates turned off. I don't have any important data on that drive, I
just use it for gaming. If I get some kind of virus, I'll just nuke the whole
thing and start fresh.

I really wish an alternative to Windows would pop up for gaming.

~~~
simantel
Depending on what games you're interested in, SteamOS can be a decent
alternative:
[http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/](http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/)

~~~
RUG3Y
I'm already dual booting Linux on that machine, but it's just not good enough
for the games I'm playing. I'd abandon Windows in a heartbeat.

I'm also using Windows to run Reaper (DAW).

------
gdulli
[https://textpad.com/download/textpad45.html](https://textpad.com/download/textpad45.html)

I use the version released in 2004. It just does everything the way I want.
I've tried many alternatives. IDEs have some cool features but are overall
annoying. It's more natural to alt-tab to an ssh window and manage a server or
see output there than manage windows/panes/whatever within a monolithic
application.

~~~
jones1618
I've also been using Textpad since Windows 95 days, I think. But you didn't
say why you are sticking with the 2004 version.

TextPad isn't technically "old" or "discontinued". It is regularly updated and
released version 8.1.2 back in March.

~~~
gdulli
Hard to remember details, but the 5.0 version felt like a big rewrite or
redesign because it lost some responsiveness or stability or features or other
things I liked about 4.7 so I reverted.

~~~
pasbesoin
Me too, as far as remembering, as the years advance. It was version 5 or one
of the major release points, where things really started to "go backwards".
Among other things, they changed the way the UI worked, in ways I found not
just different but significantly less effective and more cumbersome. IIRC,
some of this might have related to changes in the underlying libraries or
versions of libraries they were using.

Around the turn of the century, I was using Textpad as part of processing some
relatively massive text inputs. It remained solid and much more performant
than the alternatives I tried. This including its regex support, which was
great for examining, munging/transmogrifying, and cleaning up text data.
Particularly text data containing significant variability and some one-off
scenarios; having ongoing visual oversight and the ability to rapidly,
manually select areas to affect in various ways, was vastly superior to trying
to come up with command line / whole file invocations that would create the
equivalent impact.

Additionally, other editors choked on the volume/size of data files I was
dealing with.

What's that "open" alternative that's so popular? Notepad++, I think. Years
later, I needed to "beat up" some text and tried it. Despite this being years
later -- more time for development and refinement -- it was nowhere close to
Textpad. And while it had a bazillion features and functions built in, I found
those I tried to use very "shallow"; get beyond the simplest use case, and
they started to bog down and "glitch" with unexpected and/or inconsistent
behavior.

I remember trying to use it for some regex manipulations, and having to give
up on that feature.

Finally, now that I recall, Textpad was "nagware". You could actually use it
substantially and really get a feel for it. I paid for my license gladly.

------
raybb
Picasa photos manager.

There really isn't anything that's as easy to use. It automatically finds all
the photos on your computer and makes it super easy to scroll through them and
make minor edits.

~~~
mattlody
Same. I haven't been able to find any decent alternative that will allow me to
embed face data within the image itself (such as via XMP) and will deal with
the photos all being stored on my NAS rather than locally.

------
alok-g
Corel Paint Shop Pro 12. It still serves me well, and AFAIK, later versions
have not added much anyways. I have a later version which refuses to work with
Windows 10, however, this version is working fine!

------
quickthrower2
Truecrypt. Yes I know! Been too lazy to find an alternative.

Also budgeting software YNAB 4. Because the cloud version doesn't support
imports (wat?!) so I stick with the desktop version. Never mind privacy and
cost reasons (do I need a budget line for the budget software!!)

~~~
pbs
You can use this : [https://www.aescrypt.com/](https://www.aescrypt.com/)

~~~
quickthrower2
I wish the downvoters would say why. If there is a security problem with this
s/w speak up.

------
hbcondo714
Windows Media Center in Windows 8 to watch cable tv via an ATI cable card
provide by my HOA. They also include a set-top box but the remote control and
guide is terrible.

~~~
dewey
Have you looked into Plex? They support cable now I think.

~~~
hbcondo714
Sort of. I did download it but then saw that their recent cablecard tv feature
comes at a cost.

------
pandemi
µtorrent 1.7, the newer releases became bloated with bullshit and have been
too lazy to set up a new torrent client.

~~~
Siilwyn
If you ever consider switching I can recommend [Deluge]([http://www.deluge-
torrent.org/](http://www.deluge-torrent.org/)) because works great and doesn't
include any bloat!

~~~
romanovcode
Also: Open source.

[http://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/GitRepo](http://dev.deluge-
torrent.org/wiki/GitRepo)

------
mtmail
I still have Textmate ([http://macromates.com/](http://macromates.com/))
installed for the odd plugin. Javascript decoding, some math functions. I
guess I'm too lazy finding the equivalent plugin for sublime or atom editor.

~~~
mtmail
My father still uses and old
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_\(software\))
on floppy disc(!) to mirror a Windows 8 (or maybe 10 now) installation.

------
lewisl9029
The oldest piece of software I use is probably MP3Gain (looks like it hasn't
been updated for 8 years):
[http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/index.php](http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/index.php)

It's a lossless mp3 volume normalizer. I use this over ReplayGain tags because
ReplayGain isn't supported for all the devices and software I listen to music
on, and ubiquitous support is the entire reason I store my music collection in
mp3 in the first place.

I'm not married to this solution, but I just haven't found anything that works
better for me yet. Interested to hear how others deal with the issue of music
volume leveling.

------
teapot7
Photoshop 7. It still works and it does everything I want it to do. And it's
not subscription based.

I also agree with the poster who gets an old version of WinAmp. That's a
program that started out fine and the just went bonkers.

------
mrlyc
I'm still using an outliner called PC Outline 3.34. My manager gave me a copy
in 1986, saying "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right. I
bought a copy and have been using it every day since then for todo lists,
shopping lists and functional decomposition. As it's an old DOS program, I
have to run it in DOSBox on Linux or vDos on Windows 7.

I'm sticking with 3.34 as the 3.37 version has some bugs and the 1.00 version
for Windows has a lot of them.

~~~
cagey
I'm a longtime outliner software user from the DOS days. One of the last
outliner software packages I used was Grandview 2.0 by Symantec [1].

Amazingly, just a few months ago I discovered that it has been resurrected to
run in Windows using vDOS; there is a package that automates the entire
deployment process[2]. I've started using Grandview 2.0 again on Win 7 using
this package (which BTW includes a OCR'd scan of the very extensive User
manual). It works flawlessly. Unfortunately, data exchange into "modern"
formats is challenging (and you're left with a screen no larger than 80x50),
so I've not been able to use it as much as I would like. I wish there were a
modern incarnation of this or similar software, but it seems DOS software is
largely viewed as a dead-end not worth emulating in this era of GUI's.

P.S. I've tried MS Word's outline mode and find it wholly unsatisfactory.

P.P.S. my favorite outliner software was Borland's Sidekick Plus (for DOS).

[1]
[https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview...](https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/)

[2]
[http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291](http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291)

------
dvtv75
Does Windows NT 4.0 Workstation count? Technically, I don't run it, my work
does. They still use it for a few reasons, but mostly cost: it has one job to
do, which it does well enough, it's there, and a new system would need some
investment.

~~~
mariuolo
I assume it's network-isolated.

~~~
dtx1
I assume you're a highly optimistic individual with a positive outlook on the
world.

------
le-flaneur
NikonScan scanner software for their professional negative/slide scanners (I
have a Coolscan 8000).

It’s free, does a superb job and excellent for batch scanning. Never took to
the alternatives, so it still has a place on an older iMac.

------
LarryMade2
Picasa Linux - because it has some decent filters and even unsupported still
pretty awesome.

There are quite a few from KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2 that never got updated to the
new desktops that I would like to see come back.

------
nmbr213
I don't know if CDisplay would count for me. It still is my preferred choice
for manga & comics on PC, but for the last couple of years I used
PerfectViewer on my tablet for that.

------
elijahwright
I bet someone is still using Harvard Graphics.

Not even kidding. It gets the job done.

~~~
RobGR
I can confirm, I know a teacher who used DRDOS 7, WP 5.1, and Harvard Graphics
to make all their classroom handouts.

They use more modern Linux / Debian stuff for actually browsing the web and
other computing tasks, but keep several reliable DOS machines for school prep,
because of being burned on Windows and Linux having problems (mostly related
to poorly timed updates, or fsck'ing a disk) which used up hours on a night
when new material had to be ready by the next morning.

------
ksherlock
Microsoft Money (2004), running in a Windows 2K virtual machine.

Also, Evernote 2 (2007, before all the cloud nonsense) that's been copied
between 3 or 4 computers by now.

------
fuzzygroup
I still churn out 100% of my code and blog entries in TextMate 2. I've been
using TextMate since 2006 and nothing else just "feels" as good.

------
ttoinou
After Effects CS 5.5 because after this version Adobe discontinued the Pixel
Bender (HLSL) shaders

------
jamesmp98
I have a copy of Visual C++ 6.0 just for fun

------
dayve
Picasa (by Google), Especially because of the flexibility of the photo viewer.
(zoom instantly with arrow keys, etc)

------
vicmanster
KEdit an awesome text editor that has selective editing features no current
editor has.

------
nreece
ExamDiff, ColorCop, Notepad2.

------
sudoz
perhaps foobar?

~~~
ionised
That is still being updated.

Last stable version was 32 days ago.

------
digitalpacman
winamp?

------
HNNoLikey
Avafind Pro when native search doesn't work. It will scan even the system
files(and hidden folders) which are typically ignored by default unless you're
deliberate about enabling their inclusion.

