Did you miss me?

I'm back from my trip, had an amazing time, missed Lifepoint on Sunday though... heard it was amazing.

Forgot to mention... actually come to think of it, this is the first time I've put a post up from my laptop since I got rid of vista... that's right David Gregory gave me a hand (More like he did most of the work while I sat and watched) but we rid my very nice machine from d4 3v1l that is vista and replaced it with XP. Yes I know a lot of you will be saying how I should get a mac instead of a pc, but for the price?

Normally I'm geeky enough to do this kind of operation by myself, but on those same lines, normally I already all the hardware in the machine because I built it myself. Not wanting to take a chance on the new machine that I do nearly all my work on I went to the expert.

Now I've got my machine with quite a few extras, mind you it's very stable (unlike Vista) very fast (unlike Vista) almost no bloatware (unlike vista) and takes full advantage of the dual core 64 (well as close as you can get without TRUE 64... and only the geeks will understand that) (oh, and again unlike vista).

So here's some of the 3rd part apps that make my machine run the way I want it to.

Launchy For someone who does a lot of typing, or knows a ton of keyboard shortcuts (IE my hand's not always on my mouse) this is a great little program. It's a program launcher you bring up the menu (via keyboard shortcuts) and then type the name of what you want to launch, it seems to be intuitive after a while.
Dexpot I never used this program on my old machine, it's a virtual desktop program and while it's not perfect... (honestly though, what is?) it does work extremely well. I have mine set to 4, and often will have illustrator open in one window, itune in another, reference images in a third, and firefox in the fourth, transition smoothly, rarely (if ever) hangs, and it allows me to have have different settings on the different desktops, thus I have 4 different backgrounds to help me keep them straight.
xneat really helps me set up my windows environment the way I want it to be, allowing for things like window transparency, minimize and show items on the taskbar it's not flashy, but very functional.
dexpose reloaded now there are some mixed reviews on this but I personally haven't had any problems with it. See there's this program on the mac's call expose which is a really nifty task switcher, (way cooler looking than alt_tab, and way more efficient then the stupid 3d thingy they tried in vista) this is a windows version of said program.
About the only thing I don't have that one would expect (well from me) is a dock bar, and while I've used them in the past, I have found Launchy to be mush more efficient, at least for me.

and... oh bugger, right, expect me to post something tomorrow.