Now that I'm saying sayonara to Windows and getting ready to flog my AMD box on Yahoo! Auction, it's time to pay homage to the Windows programs that made it all worthwhile.
First, the utilities category:
First place goes to CC Cleaner. When I first installed XP, I put it in a separate partition and gave it 8 gigabytes to play around with. What was I thinking? It wasn't long before XP began demanding more hard drive space. My old copy of Partition Magic didn't play with XP and I didn't want to pony up for a new version. I moved everything I could off the C drive, but I still got messages telling me that XP was running out of drive space and sucking for air. CC Cleaner saved my butt and got all the junk of my C drive. A lot of the trash was leftover files from XP's endless rounds of patches and upgrades. Ever since I started using CC Cleaner, I've had about 1.5 GB free space on my Windows programs that made it all worthwhile.
Honorable mention goes to:
XP Powertoys
The two I'll remember are Tweak UI and Open Command Window Here. I'm not a command line kind of guy, but when forced to use it, having the an "Open Command Window Here" on the right click menu, made getting started a lot easier.
Tweak UI helped me refine the XP interface to my liking without having to trudge through the Registry. It was a relatively painless way to control what appeared on my Start Menu and Desktop. It also put and end to Autoplay, XP's annoying habit of nagging me with repetitive questions every time I inserted a CD or DVD. Tweak UI is also an easy way to change the location of files in the My Documents folder.
Tune XP 1.5
Everyone complains about how XP takes forever to boot up and even longer to shut down. Tune XP can help, especially in the shut down department. It used to take XP 3 to 5 minutes to reluctantly drift into unconsciousness. Now it goes down in 30 to 40 seconds. I wish Tune XP would work on my 6 year old son.
Coming up next: Applications
