Performance versus Appearance

Living in a household where a lot of people come and go, I have my share of time observing how people use their techie gadgets. The most common thing people have these days are laptops and desktops. Desktops are cheaper and have more computing power than laptops but laptops provide portability. Statistically speaking, laptops are more common than desktops. I could go on and talk about how Linux-based OS would be a better option but I’d rather not, since most of you who might read this haven’t or have minimal experience with Linux-based OS. What I’ll just talk about is how to help your “toy” perform better and maximize its hardware capabilities. (All suggestions would not involve pirated software of course!)

Which OS should you use?
It depends actually. Whatever was provided when you bought your laptop, you should use it because you paid for it. There is no such thing as free XP or free Vista. Vendors are just saying it’s a package and it’s free but you are actually paying for the OS. Now if you have a choice whether to get a vista laptop or XP, go for XP. Vista is so damn slow and takes up so much space and you only get sub par graphics with your desktop which you don’t really need. Plus, using Vista will give you that annoying security thing every time you copy or delete or execute files. Ah, stupidity and redundancy at its finest. And may I quote Rex on this one, “It’s just like the guards at mall entrances – they pretend to check your bag but in reality, it’s just for show. It’s practically useless and just a waste of time.”

How can I maximize my XP experience?
I would suggest you use nLite on your XP installer to get rid of things that you don’t need before installing to your laptop. This will get rid of languages that you don’t really use and extra drivers to hardware that your laptop doesn’t have. An nLited version of XP would help you trim down your installation requirements to less than 2GB. If XP is already installed in your laptop, I suggest you change your settings to “adjust for best performance”. This would remove unnecessary themes and eyecandy that would just consume your RAM. Refer to this document.

What antivirus should I use?
This one is the ultimate question for Microsoft product users. I don’t recommend Norton, since the whole thing just unnecessarily eats up your resources. (Norton Ghost? Are you there?) If it were 2 years ago, I will suggest AVG but I don’t recommend it now. Try Avast. It’s free and lightweight! If you’re using Linux, it’s worry free surfing. No malware to watch out for and no viruses to infect your system! Sorry, I couldn’t help it! Haha!

WTF?! Windows Media Player can’t play *.avi and *.mp4 files? Yeah. Yeah. Sucks huh? That’s windows for you, haha. The media player would suggest you download codecs from the internet but that wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead, use VLC media player which plays almost all video formats – including FLVs so you don’t need FLV players after getting videos from YouTube.

I have internet! Yay!
I suggest you install a download manager and a torrent manager so you can download stuff you like. What’s the difference? Download managers help you resume direct downloads in case you get disconnected while torrent mangers are well for torrents. I suggest you use μTorrent and Flashget. These two don’t eat up a lot of resources and are free from ads and spyware.

When you browse websites, don’t do so using IE7. It is the devil! Aside from its copycat use of tabs, it’s just a lousy upgraded browser Microsoft created with very few add-ons. Use Firefox! Aside from being much more secure than IE7, Firefox has a lot of plug-ins and extensions that could help you customize your browser as you please. With Firefox, you get the ultimate browsing experience!

If you have instant messenger accounts like Yahoo! (ya-hoooh! Not yahhhh-hooh), Gmail, AOL etc., use Pidgin so that you can put all these accounts in one window. Plus, Pidgin is a lot faster than YM is because it does not have the voice call option. If you want to do voice calls, use Skype instead. It’s way better!

Some other reminders! When installing new software to your laptop, as much as possible, always do custom installations. This will help you remove the things you don’t need. For example you want to install Nero and you don’t do custom install, you will get a movie player, a video creator, a video streamer etc. These other things might already be part of your system. All you really need is software to burn CDs/DVDs so just install what you need.

Stay away from porn sites! Do not click that Angelina.jolie.exe file or that blinking cute blond girl. Malicious software and viruses usually lurk in these sites because users usually can’t resist going deep into these sites. If you really can’t resist the temptation of browsing porn sites, I guess the best way to browse is through Linux-based OS. And if you want pornography, just click here. (Please don’t click the link. Pornography is bad!)

Is that all? No other handy softwares?
7zip. For compressing and uncompressing files! It’s free!
Rename! Mass rename files! (only for the OC people!)

That’s it for now. I hope I don’t get fired for writing a very boring column. Haha! I hope I could make an interesting one next time. Oh! And one last thing, Try creating a folder named “con” in windows. I’ll give one hundred bucks to anyone who can do it. Haha! Bye!

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10 plus 10 is 100!