Cleaning day…

Today was clean-my-computer day at the anonymonk’s lair. It basically consisted of going into Add/Remove Programs and deleting everything I don’t use.

So here are today’s winners and losers:

Gone are:

Entbloess – An ExposÃ© clone – It’s too slow and I don’t like the way it opens all minimized windows before showing the desktop and then leaves them open after you select an application. Besides, I already paid for WinPLOSION, which works really nice.

NewsGator Outlook Edition: I could never get used to it. I’m trying JÃ¤ger, which I think could be a great program but I feel it asks me to change my ways too much. I’m also trying out Omea, which is offering free licenses until the end of the year – but I think it tries to do too much. I may just stick to NewsGator Online and Bloglines for the time being. While on the subject, why are all RSS readers offering Bloglines synchronization and not NewsGator synchronization?

Also gone are a bunch of trial software whose evaluation periods had expired.

I completely uninstalled Thunderbird and Firefox because I had a bunch of entries in the Add/Remove box (Firefox 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, etc) that were annoying. I reinstalled Firefox from scratch because it was randomly crashing. I then reinstalled only those extensions I really use. Things look fine now. I did not reinstall Thunderbird yet, because I went back to Outlook – and X1 indexes all my old Thunderbird email anyway.

Last night I installed the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta in my search for the perfect desktop-search tool. Also installed on my system are X1 and Copernic Desktop. Both MSN and Copernic are free, but I algo got X1 for free – so it’s all the same to me. Gone are FileHand Search and Google Desktop.

Also gone is Cool Desk, a Virual Desktop Manager. I’ve never really “gotten” these VDMs. Besides, I connect my laptop to an external flatpanel at work (for a two-monitor setup) and revert to a single display anywhere else – not sure if VDM’s can handle this efficiently.

Also gone: WinRAR and WinZIP. I use BitZipper and only downloades those because I had trouble with a particular RAR file. Turns out WinZIP cannot handle RAR files and WinRAR had the same problem as BitZipper, although it did manage it more elegantly – which led me to realize the problem had to do with a path/filename combination that was too long when extracted.

Konfabulator in now gone too. Although it looks nice, the widgets are pretty much useless to me – fun, but useless. Most of what I need from Konfabulator I can get from StatBar. And Konfabulator had the nasty habit of remaining in memory, hogging all resources, when you quit the application. Gone.

Finally, I removed the trial version of ActiveWords, since I can do most of what I used ActiveWords for with the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta. I’ve created Deskbar shortcuts in MSN Toolbar Suite Beta (type @ in the search box to see what I mean) that allow me to quickly load any application. I’ve set Ctrl-Q as the Deskbar quick-key, so I can now simply press “Ctrl-Q, w” to load Word (e for Excel, ps for Photoshop, n for Notepad, etc.).

I’m sure I deleted more stuff… the fact that I don’t remember what it was should tell you something about how relevant I found it to be.

Comments from original posting of this article (on my previous blog):

When you have time, let’s talk. If the only things you were using ActiveWords were to the few things that you mentioned, you had only touched the surface of what we do. You didn’t mention any of our angents, particularly the Outlook agent.

I would be happy to take you through ActiveWords top to bottom teach you a bit about scripting, and show you the error of your ways!

You ping, and I will ring you back,and Skype would be even better.

Merry Christmas!

Buzz

Posted by: Buzz Bruggeman | December 21, 2004 12:24 AM