In 2002 I bought a rather shiny sony laptop. FX705 I think, can’t remember. Sony had a wide range of laptops at the time. this was the budget range. It was/is heavy, looks less sexy than the average sony laptop, but had a good spec for the price.

As a geeky tech type person I have rather surprisingly never re-installed it. I think I was resisting partly for sub-conscious reasons: at University we spent our entire time installing, re-configuring and generally tweaking (i.e. breaking, breaking and more breaking) our computers, I wanted to prove to myself that I had moved on, grown up. Now it was a tool, for listening, communicating, reading (there are some pages on wikipedia I still haven’t read) etc. Spending hours at a computer simply to break its registry and reinstall the OS again was unproductive. And I am a productive person. I know, I keep telling myself so it must be true. well okay, actually, I just read BBC news and slashdot. But the thought was there.

Anyways. After over 5 years of use it had gradually crawled to just-about-quicker-than-stationary. I think people should do research in to this, it fascinates me, how can a system, which didn’t have that many applications installed, had minimal stuff running at start up, etc, end up at the point that running anything took 30 seconds or so. Start IE, or Firefox, or Word, or even the sodding volume control (there is nothing more annoying in Windows that the bloody time it takes to allow you to change the bloody volume) and then sit back and relax (or sit back and get stressed, I normally went for the latter).

How can a system just become like this? I had pruned and cleaned and done all the things one can think of (and the thing you are thinking of, yup tried that and all). We all take it for granted but why. I was trying to explain to someone why I was doing this, and failed to give a good explanation. I tried to explain things about registry bloat and lost of dll files – but can’t you clean them out, and do they really make it that much slower – well ummm sort of. I didn’t do a very good job of explaining which made me realise that I really had no idea why installing the same OS from scratch should make such a difference.

Sometimes I feel that all computers should just be shipped with a Knoppix CD-ROM, and the Harddisk just used for storing docs and user files. An OS is much more secure and will be consistent over time in its responsiveness if it is on a read only CD-ROM :)

So I now have a new installed computer, made possible partly due to the external USB drive I was given recently (though my laptop’s two USB ports are v1 and so it is very slow).

Software installed (for my own reference, and in case you see anything of interest):

• Opera – the alternative, alternative web browser (why spend time using loads of Firefox plugins when Opera has it all built in).
• Thunderbird – never seems to get the fame it deserves (and it is disappointing that it is being split apart from the Mozilla organisation, they had loads of cash (thanks to Google ads) and Thunderbird could do with some of it. There’s no real alternatives on Windows, except Eudora and OE.
• Firefox
• Killcopy – Get annoyed when copying loads of files and it fails halfway through because it doesn’t like a file, but you have no easy way of knowing what directories/files have been copied and which have not? killcopy sits as a option in the right click menu and makes copyinig and moving files far less painful
• Picassa – Google’s picture viewer
• Thumbnails Plus – another image viewer with a few more options, purchased a licence a few years a go.
• XNview – yet another image viewer, but some good batch processing options
• Notepad++ For years Windows was lacking a good free text editor, there was PFE, which was ok – not wonderful – and no longer updated. For a while I used Text Editor, but Notepad++ seems to work very well with no configuration required.
• Itunes – for the Ipod!
• BBC Iplayer – just signed up for this.
• Quicktime, flash, realplayer, Java.
• Foxit PDF viewer – much quicker than Adobe Acrobat reader, and doesn’t try to run at startup.
• May yet install: 7zip, ‘command prompt from here’ powertoy, ActiveState Perl, Google Desktop (just for replacing Windows crappy search facility), Office, MeetingMaker, Putty, Filezilla, Skype

Quicktime, Realplayer, Adobe Acrobat Reader all hit two of my pet hates. These are applications which for most people are just there to help them access content on the web, yet they all try to run when Windows starts – Why do I need a PDF viewer running when it can just run when I require it. Secondly they all put icons on the desktop, and often in ‘Quick Lauch’, most people will never need to run these manually so putting an icon on the desktop is just silly. It promotes their product at the expensive of annoying the user (or for the average user, they will not know if it is ‘safe’ to delete the icon even though they know they do not use it, which in my book is reducing the user experience). Itunes, Picassa and others are also guilty but at least these are applications the user may want to run and have a slight reason why they want to run at startup.