Favorite Files

1. Burrrn
2. Exact Audio Copy
3. foobar2000
4. K-Lite Codec Pack Full
5. K-Meleon
6. Klipfolio Personal Dashboard
7. Mozilla Firefox for Windows (v2)
8. Nero
9. NewsLeecher
10. Opera for Windows
11. QuickTime for Windows
12. Spybot - Search & Destroy
13. SpywareBlaster
14. Total Uninstall
15. ViRC
16. VLC (VideoLAN) for Windows

Recent Posts

1. 
   Review - Total Uninstall

   5.4.2 (Nov 15, 2009)

   Really nice timesaver and house keeping application for those who install, test and un-install a lot of software.
   
   It would get 5 stars if it it cleaned everything and if one could export import installed programs changes properly from an old system to a new system.

2. 
   Review - XnView for Windows

   1.97 Beta 2 (Nov 12, 2009)

   Fast and full featured, but buggy and crashes quite a lot. As such, close, but no cigar.

3. 
   Review - Google Chrome for Windows

   2.0.174.0 Beta (Apr 20, 2009)

   Tech demo, still. Not ready for prime time.
   
   Lacks a huge number of even basic UI features (like disable underlining of links).
   
   Not to mention extensibility is near to zero still and as the basic feature set doesn't contain what modern competition does, well...
   
   Further, it phones home like a madman and these are hard or impossible to turn off (unless one uses SRWare Iron 3rd party build).
   
   One extra star it gets is for its Javascript speed: Chrome blows the competition out of the water (Opera 10 alpha, Firefox 3.1b3, Webkit Nightly, IE8) in terms of speed. It really is that fast.
   
   Second comes from its memory protection and current level of security, which is unparalleled so far.
   
   BTW, the Google version numbering system is completely useless and silly. V2? Gimme a break, it's not even out of alpha yet (i.e. feature complete for v1)! It's as if they're trying to close the distance with IE.
   
   Ok, fair enough. I'll start using Chrome, when it's at version 8.0... It'll probably start to be useful then.
   
   Really google, nice ideas, but bad implementation (sans the js engine and tab based memory protection).

4. 
   Review - Microsoft Windows Search for Windows XP / Server 2003

   4.0 (Apr 17, 2009)

   Good idea, bad execution:
   
   1. Does not install/uninstall/re-install cleanly - can foul up its own settings: end result is errors in previewing indexed search hits
   
   2. Unreliable indexing on a huge number of files / multiple filters (MS only): resets the index to zero and starts indexing again from scratch
   
   3. All search functions disabled while indexing is in progress (cf. above)
   
   4. Arbitrary / not user-selectable file size limit on files to be indexed (e.g. cannot index big PDF files)
   
   5. Does not support various file types properly for full contents indexing (e.g. djvu)
   
   6. Several usability quirks that only MS can manage - too long list to be detailed here, but one of the most important is that there are almost no user selectable settings to configure anything - just locations and file types
   
   Very unreliable - not ready for prime time.
   
   Will try again with Search 5.0 to see if the bugs are fixed.

5. 
   Review - digsby

   Build 45 (r19635) (Jan 17, 2009)

   Unless you know what you are doing, stay away from this huge ad-bloat-ware installer with known security risks.
   
   There are better options out there (Miranda, Pidgin, Trillian, etc).

6. Comment - Adobe Preps Response to Microsoft XPS

   Build 45 (r19635) (Dec 15, 2006 - 12:01 PM)

   Whatever the industry standard in the future, I hope it becomes FULLY open, with lots of competition on the software the can open/edit/save/print/transform the particular document format.
   
   Any possible format that is proprietary to Microsoft or to Adobe, is something I'd rather not have.
   
   I mean, not have another proprietary format from them.
   
   Formats should be open.
   
   They can keep their software proprietary if they like, but document exchange format should be open to all.