In 2008, you either assembled a brand-new computer or reinstalled Windows XP. The next two hours were a fixed ritual: open a download site and work your way through an installation list you knew by heart, installing every item from start to finish. Nobody ever taught you this list, yet every internet café administrator and every "classmate who knows how to fix computers" in the dorms had a copy—and the contents were surprisingly consistent.
The Winzheng Software History Archive recently restored more than a thousand software catalog pages from 2006–2010 via the Wayback Machine—one of the original sources of this very installation list. Browsing through these pages brings a generation's internet memories rushing back. Today, let's lay out that list again, in the order it was installed back then.
Step 1: The Input Method—Getting Your Computer to Type Chinese
The first thing to install was always the input method. 2008 was the turning point: Sogou Pinyin V3.2 swept Smart ABC into history with its "cloud dictionary," earning a five-star recommendation on the archive page; old-school users were still installing Ziguang Pinyin, while the fastest typists insisted on Wangma Wubi 86/98 Edition—"Master Wubi and you'll be a legend in every internet café."
What happened next: Sogou Input Method won the entire war and remains mainstream to this day; Sogou Inc. was absorbed into Tencent in 2021. Wubi became a niche professional skill, and Ziguang faded from view.
Step 2: QQ, and "Invisible to Everyone but Them"
Next came Tencent QQ 2009 Beta 2—the archive page shows it was updated in March 2009, five stars. It was the golden age of QQ Show, Qzone, and the virtual parking-space game, when "invisible to everyone but them" was how a generation handled secret crushes. For video chat, there was Sina UC, where voice rooms always had someone singing the song "Qiu Fo" (Pray to Buddha).
What happened next: QQ is still around, but after WeChat appeared in 2011, it gradually became "the thing you use to send files." MSN was officially retired in 2014.
Step 3: TTPlayer, and the Romance of Scrolling Lyrics
The throne of music players belonged to TTPlayer v5.5: skins, an equalizer, and auto-matched scrolling lyrics—in an era before licensed streaming, it was the perfect manager for a local music library. The international crowd used Winamp 5.551 ("It really whips the llama's ass"), while those chasing the latest songs were already installing Kugou Music 2009.
What happened next: TTPlayer was acquired by Baidu in 2006, and its independent client quietly disappeared a decade later; Winamp stopped development in 2013; Kugou grew into a corner of Tencent Music's empire. The local player as a species gave way entirely to streaming.
Step 4: Storm Player "Universal Edition"—Codecs Are Justice
For watching videos, you installed Storm Player V3.5 Universal Edition—the word "universal" hit the pain point squarely: RMVB, AVI, MKV, it could play anything. On the eve of the streaming era, RealPlayer 11 and .rm files were synonymous with online video; to watch "internet TV," you needed PPLive or PPS, watching the buffer bar spin round and round, with the whole dorm squeezed around one computer on World Cup nights.
What happened next: Storm Entertainment had a glamorous IPO in 2015 and a quiet delisting in 2019; PPS was acquired by iQiyi in 2013; RealPlayer faded from the mainstream. Licensed streaming platforms ended the entire "install a player" era.
Step 5: The Download Trio—Bandwidth Had to Be Fought For
In the 512K "small pipe" era, download tools were a necessity: Mini Thunder was lightweight and never popped up ads; eMule loyalists left eMule Plus running all night in the idealism of "resource sharing"; and webmasters and graphic designers couldn't do without the FTP veteran FlashFXP.
Step 6: The Antivirus Three-Kingdom Showdown
The antivirus market in 2008 was a true Warring States period: the lion from Rising 2008 was still rolling around on the desktop (the archive page notes a "free for six months" promotion), Kingsoft Internet Security 2008 and Jiangmin KV2007 stood on equal footing, and discerning users gritted their teeth and went with Kaspersky KIS 7.0—at the cost of a boot time slow enough to brew a cup of tea.
What happened next: In July 2008, 360 Antivirus announced it would be free forever, and the foundation of the paid antivirus market collapsed. Rising followed with a free model in 2011, Jiangmin gradually faded away, Kingsoft Internet Security was folded into Cheetah Mobile, and only Kaspersky continues to sell subscriptions in the global market. This "free revolution" was the most thorough business model disruption in the history of Chinese software.
Step 7: The Toolbox—WinRAR and Its Friends
Finally, the eternal tool set: WinRAR 3.80 Chinese Localized Version (the evaluation period was always one day from expiring), the virtual drive DAEMON Tools 4.12, the burning king Nero 8, ACDSee 10 for viewing images, Super Rabbit for "slimming down" the system, the browser upstart Firefox 3.0.8 challenging IE6, and a copy of PowerWord 2005 squatting in the bottom-right corner of the desktop.
What happened next: optical drives disappeared from computers, and DAEMON Tools and Nero lost their stage; Chrome launched in September 2008 and reshuffled the browser wars; and WinRAR—yes, it's still here, and you've almost certainly still never paid for it.
One Installation List, One Generation's Internet
Looking back, this installation list is really a slice of its era: it records the collapse of paid software into the free-plus-ads model, the migration of standalone tools to cloud services, and the death of "download and install" as an action itself. Back then, the list was determined by the five-star recommendations of download site editors; today, the power to choose tools has passed to a different kind of ranking—for instance, choosing which AI model to write code or run searches is now based on benchmark data rather than editor scores.
The archive pages for these old programs—dates of inclusion, version numbers, and the editors' original descriptions—have all been restored in the Software History Archive. The archive is for historical preservation and research only and offers no downloads. Feel free to look up the page for what you installed back then; and if your installation list differs from ours, see you in the comments.
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