PC maintenance

Last week, I had to recover my PC at home, after it crashed. After installing XP-SP2, I was on a look out for tools and utilities.

First of all I had to backup my ever growing hard disk space. With a few thousand folders, I found it hard to re-organize them based on purpose and size. TreeSize from JAM software was very handy. I found Nero to be a good choice to burn them on to storage disks.

Loads of pics that were transferred to my PC from my digital camera were not just eating bulk of the disk space, but was also making it tough to organize and manage. Picasa from google seemed to be of light-weight with loads of functions(though it seems to munch out much of the available RAM).

Tune-up utilities 2006 with its intuitive user interface and useful bunch of finetuning functions was also interesting.

Choice of antivirus and anti-spyware utilities was a bit tricky. After evaluating few options, I had to settle with Norton Antivirus 2006, atleast for the time being. Microsoft Antispyware is also one useful anti-spyware utility.

With the ever-growing security threats with IE, i decided to switch to FireFox. Of the many useful features - Tabbed browsing and growing list of extensions seemed to be of immediate use.

I also chose to move to Thunderbird for email and configured my GMail account that has free POP3 support. For its attempt with pluggable themes, skins , extensions and most importantly - 'Freedom of choice', I think Thunderbird is worth it. Though, there are some aspects that require improvement, Thunderbird definitely seems to be on the right track making it big.