In early December I ordered a Nokia N800 internet tablet from Play.com for the bargain price of £150 (it was later reduced to £139 – I got a £20 refund – but it’s currently listed at £169. Play.com seemed to have trouble getting hold of stock as it took about 5 weeks to arrive but after our first few weeks together, read on for my first impressions.
With my main desktop PC at misbehaving (taking longer to boot, and randomly freezing) I took the opportunity over the Christmas break to do a rebuild (no comments about my choice of OS please!). All my data is stored on a separate partition from the OS and I have backups to a network drive of all my valuable data anyway (photos, music, video, docs etc) so it was just a case of wiping the C:\ drive and reinstalling all the apps. The main XP resintall only took about 20mins but it took another day and a half to install the updates and reinstall the apps I use.
First url I visited after reinstalling the OS? http://www.getfirefox.com.
I have a tendency to install and try out lots of new apps and utilities when I see them so over time my PC ends up cluttered with stuff that gets little or no use. After the rebuild I decided to only reinstall apps when I missed not having them. Very quickly I found there were a few utilities that I use frequently and really increase my productivity so here are my picks of windows utilities I can’t live without:
