Too all the Bill Gates fanboys and girls

So it took me a while to get to the "My favorite windows apps" post because I realized the only cool apps I really add to windows besides games are antivirus stuff and iTunes. So I had to think extra hard and finally came up with a few, so here they are.

And in the spirit of this post I'm writing it on what I've nicknamed the Dell Phoenix. Its an old Dell 600m laptop that has either broken or caught on fire (sorry, Dave) for everyone I know that has had one. My motherboard gave out a year after I bought it and I finally got it up and running again thanks to ebay bargains and more recently from parts from my dearly departed iBook G4. These laptops were also the ones that shipped with exploding batteries. Its only true redeeming quality is that the hard drive is located in such a place that I can pull it out and slam in another one in seconds, making it the perfect computer to try out all the flavors of linux while still having a backup XP drive. But this isn't about linux, its about our good ol' workhorse windows XP. And only XP because I tried vista and got the blue screen of death within a week and it ran all my games 10 fps slower than XP.

First up is the boring but necessary mention of Firefox. Every time I reinstall XP (which is weirdly a lot) I make the same joke: I bet the number one reason to use Internet Explorer is to download Firefox. I know, its a crappy joke, but really does anyone actually use IE for anything else?  New poll on the right to see what everyone else uses.

Next are my obligatory anti-virus/firewall/trojan cleaner apps that PC users have to worry about. I recently found Comodo and it seems to be doing a pretty solid job so far. Its a (FREE!!!) fully functioning internet security suite that has lots of updates and has the firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam stuff all included. Its nice to have it all available in the same program. CCleaner is like the PC equivalent of Onyx for the mac. It cleans out all the junk that builds up and slows your comp down. And of course there's good old Adaware to clean off all the spyware on your computer that all of you pick up while looking for 2 girls 1 cup. Sure, sure, it was just to see what all the fuss was about. I believe you.

Then there's the Quicksilver-like Launchy. It's open source, and is a keystroke app launcher. Set it to the same key command as Quicksilver and you won't want to kill your PC every time you have to use it instead of your mac. Or maybe that's just me. In any case its nice and makes getting to programs, folders, and files really easy.

I'm going to cheat here for the next two and say Gmail and Google Reader. While not windows apps, they make moving back and forth between computers super easy. I put the links up in the bookmark bar of firefox and I can check my email or RSS feeds on any comp I own. Beautiful. Not using google reader to view stuff on the web is like following a football game by only listening to the TV audio. That doesn't make sense, does it? Exactly.

Maybe I'm cheating here too, and I owe this one to Martin, but Del.icio.us is possibly my favorite thing on the planet at this moment. It's an online bookmark tool that saves all your bookmarks by different "tags" that you give them when you save it. Add the toolbar to Firefox or safari, and whenever you want to save a bookmark you hit the tag button, save as many key words to that bookmark as you want and that's it. When you want to find a bookmark, they're all automatically organized by the keyword tags. And since its all online, you can have all your bookmarks on all your computers synced all the time. How awesome is that? You can even access them through their website, so you can find your bookmarks even if you aren't at your computer. Genius.

For all you social (network) butterflies, there's Digsby. It combines all your online accounts into one cool application making stalking that special someone that much more efficient. Right now I use it for my AIM account, facebook chat, myspace, gmail and gchat and more. It tells you when you have new mail, or new comments/posts/messages or even when people update their status and all that jazz. It was a bit awkward to set up with facebook (I had to reset my password from Digsby to get it to connect) but now that its set it's really a nice easy way to combine all that stuff. And don't worry mac and linux fans, they're working on versions for us too.

The last thing isn't so much an application as it is something to give XP a look a little more modern than the janky blue/green desktop that's been around since 2001.  Embedded is a slick looking dark blue theme that can be installed really easily and used just like any other XP theme.  It was created and signed by MS (which is why it's so easy to get to work) but never officially released.  But these things have a way of finding their way into our greedy little mitts, and now you know about it, so get to it.

Aaaaaaand just to make a point: My Phoenix just got some weird XP bug that won't let it access the internet anymore, so this post was finished on the shiny new MBP.  The bug has apparently been around for years and there's just no good fix.  Well there's a new distro of Linux out I want to try, maybe I'll post about that and try to get a few converts.

e.