AllOfAVI and AllOfEXE
AllOfMP3 has got to be the website I purchase the most stuff from (and probably the only one). I’m so fancied by their simplicity and price that I wish I could download movies and legal software like this. Snap!
Every Product Needs Screenshots
I recently went through this list of replacements for Windows shells and explorer, looking through each product page trying to find an attractive shell. Since there were a lot of these, I opened them all in tabs and went through each one quickly. I quickly came to the realization that what I was looking for was screenshots, nothing else. If the product page did not have screenshots of the shell, I closed it.
Then I realized that not only graphical and theme programs need screenshots, but every product needs screenshots. Essentially, the graphical interface is what the user will be looking at and interacting with. The point is not to necessarily have an attractive interface, but if there are no screenshots for a product at all, the user fails to establish an initial impression of the product, and thus moves on.
I know I’ve missed out on a lot of good products that do not include screenshots on their product pages (e.g. 7-Zip, Winamp, Thunderbird, etc) until recently. It’s all about marketing, and if there is no marketing at all, then the user will never see it.
What I Learned from Reinstalling Windows XP
Starting up Windows XP with 500MB of memory already used means reformatting and reinstalling Windows XP. And so I spent the week reinstalling and fine-tuning many programs.
It seems that every time I reinstall XP, I learn something new. This time, I got to know some programs that I knew before but obviously did not know enough about.
WinRAR
I’ve always used WinRAR, despite the fact that it’s a trial. This time though, it caused me hours trying to debug its problems. Under certain conditions, installing WinRAR on Windows XP will create a shell bug in explorer.exe, causing it to crash upon system shutdown or user logoff. It wasn’t until I created system restore point after every installation of a program that I realized that WinRAR is a piece of crap.
7-Zip
Unlike WinRAR, 7-Zip is open source, free, and bug free. The latter two of those three features made me jump up and down. It works just like WinRAR and caused me no trouble switching over. This will stay on my list for the next reinstall of XP.
Winamp
I switched to iTunes about a year ago because it seemed to be the trend (and because of my iPod). But I decided to give Winamp a try — smartest decision of the day. Winamp has a 4MB installation, as opposed to the 70MB installation of iTunes. Winamp uses about 10MB of memory, while iTunes uses up to 100MB. Winamp is fast, iTunes interface is really laggy. Best of all, Winamp supports the iPod too, with the iPod support plugin.
Notepad++
Maybe I’ve been under the rock for the last two years, but I’ve been using Notepad++ 3.0 and never updated. The newest version is 3.5 and damn it shines on my monitor! The UI has improved so much that I doubt I’ll install Dreamweaver. The icons have changed from the ugly oldschool 8-bit bitmaps to shiny gradient PNG icons. Maybe it was because my previous Windows was getting really bloated, but this new version seems to launch really quickly — as fast as Windows Notepad itself.
I spent a couple of minutes checking through the options in each program too. Now with a working computer, the start-up memory usage is less than 110MB!
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