TechPenny - Essential Software

The Hardware

    If you have been reading up on Vista and the state of gaming, my issues will sound familiar, but there’s nothing like sharing misery, chuckling over mistakes, and in the end you may even learn something new.
   
    To kick it off right, I needed new hardware. Vista Aero is a huge hog and to play the latest and greatest games with DirectX 10 (more on later how much that sucked) I need the latest graphics card. I went cheap with the CPU and went with the dual core, but I bought the Gigabyte P35 motherboard that would support the latest Penryn 45nm Intel chips. I bought 2 Gb of ram and the current champ of video cards, NVidia’s 8800 GT. TechReport has a good system guide here. Slightly off topic, in order to save some cash I decided to reuse Dell’s case, a BIG mistake. Dell has the greatest deals on systems, however to prevent you from cannibalizing their parts they have a lot of non-standard parts. The case fans on Dell have non-standards plug wiring such that if you plug them into any other motherboard they do not work. The motherboards do not have the standard screws into the case, this was my gotcha, double check between your new motherboard and the case there is no short circuit. After a lot of hours, $30 dollars poorer, and more pissed off at Dell, I did get it all to work.

    Newegg did the job, no major complaints, parts did come in two separate shipments. Its another story on getting it over clocked and stable, but next time we actually get to how Vista doesn’t play nicely with Crysis.

Mozilla hasn’t stopped innovating since they came out with their Internet Explorer browser killer, Firefox. The people at Mozilla now bring you a few more new products.

In the music category we have Mozilla Songbird, a media player mashed-up with the web. I hate to hate on Microsoft more, but there Windows Media Player has only gotten worse with each new iteration. WMP is slow and bloated with Urge music download. The interface is hard to use with the disappearing menu bar. Upon installation Songbird was easy to use, I just scanned my folder for music files and I was up. The current beta version 0.3 is a little sluggish but the interface is intuitive and clean to use. I eagerly await the the final product.

In the calendering and task management category they have released a stand alone version of their Lightning plugin for Firefox in the form of Sunbird. I personally like the stand alone application more as I like to work offline and I don’t want to maintain my information online. Its sad to report but version 0.7 is still a little buggy, I had some issues with setting the time correctly and the auto-update feature. Again, I still recommend it, but be aware it is not fully 100% complete.

The other product that is standard is a mail program, Mozilla has Thunderbird It supports tagging, message threads, junk mail filters, and searching. To give Microsoft a break, Outlook is fast and fairly easy to use, but functionality wise it is falling behind Google mail. Microsoft needs to step up, they have been complacent for too long. We the consumer are no longer locked, we should choose with our software until Microsoft does better.