What I Use

On this page I list the different hardware and software I use on a daily basis.

Hardware

For travelling and doing a lot of my multimedia management I use my laptop; the HP dv9074ea. This is a 17 inch desktop replacement laptop. It is running an AMD Turion64x2 Mobile Technology TL 56 processor, with 2 GB RAM and 2 80GB harddrives. It is running an nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics solution.

The Windows Experience Index for this machine is;

My desktop computer is a home-built system with a ASUS P5K-E WiFi AP edition motherboard, Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor with 6 GB RAM. The graphics card is a Powercolor Radeon HD 4870 and I have two hard discs with a total of 750 GB storage available.

Software

On my laptop I have the Windows 7 Beta x64 version, and on my dekstop I have Windows Vista x64 Ultimate. I have the Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition installed on both machines, and thus use Outlook 2007 for email management. In order to combine my “in the cloud” email (gmail and hotmail) with my regular POP3 email I use the Outlook Connector 12.1 Beta software. I have also installed the xobni program to help with managing all my email. I am a collector of sorts and have a bad habit of keeping old emails around so my PST file is large. Xobni makes it extremely easy to find and manage my mail – brilliant extension!

I use Windows Live Photo Gallery for importing and managing my photos. For editing my photos I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. I also use Google Picasa3 for backing up photos to the cloud.

For managing my music collection I have to admit to using iTunes. I am not to happy about this particular software as it is extremely slow, not to say outright buggy, but have to use it as I have an Apple iPhone 16Gb. We also have two additonal iPod Touches in the house that need syncing. To keep my metadata synced with the Windows Media Player and Zune Software I use MusicBridge. And I use MediaMonkey to tag and add album art to the music collection.

When I want to rip a DVD to bring it with me on the iPod Touch I use Slysoft AnyDVD and Handbrake for the ripping and conversion.

I have started using Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for my web browsing, having before used IE 7. I tried to use Firefox 3 for a while, but couldn’t get used to it. The one (silly) feature I missed too much was  the ability to just click the little blur arrow in my favorites bar to open a bookmarked site in a new tab, a one click operation as opposed to the two click operation in Firefox 3.

For my blogging I use Winodws Live Writer, and for chatting I use Windows Live Messenger. For twittering I use tweetdeck and thwirl on my computers and tweetie on my iPhone.

For security I returned back to Symantec and am now using Norton Internet Security 2009 on all the computers in the house. It is not bloated anymore and is no longer a system hog.

I am trying out Windows Live Mesh and SyncToy in order to sync files and documents between my computers as well as mainting documents I am working on in the cloud.

For keeping track of which applications I actually use the most, I use Wakoopa.

Multimedia players

As I stated above I now have an iPhone (which I love – I live in this device now!) in addition to two iPod Touch 8GB versions. We also have one Zune 4 Gb player in the house.