Software Suggestions

 

As many readers probably know, Mozilla released it’s newest version of the Firefox web browser this week. Every review I have read so far seems very impressed. I used to run FF on our old computer because Internet Explorer was so vulnerable to viruses and pop-ups. Since we upgraded to Vista, installed some heavy-duty security and filters I’ve been very lazy and sticking with IE. This coming week my wife is going to be out of town leaving me with two computers at my disposal and it seemed like a great time to do some tune-ups on our desktop PC.

The first order of business is to do an initial back-up of the hard drive using Mozy, which we just purchased for a year.  My main goal with Mozy is to protect the thousands of digital photos we have on our hard drive. Up till now my security has involved backing the photos up on flash drives quarterly and storing them in our safety deposit box at the bank. That’s getting to be a pain, though I still plan to use that system to protect digital scans of all our important docs (marriage license, birth certificate, social security cards, deed). The initial backup is probably going to take about 3 days. After that Mozy will only backup files that have changed and should be much faster.

I’ve been reading about some other great products, mostly free, over at Lifehacker. Some of them will probably be taken on a test-run later in the week. Just thought I would use this post to solicit suggestions from readers. What tools are you using to make your computing life more fun/better/productive/easy/organized? What could you not imagine anyone living without? For example, I seriously don’t know how I survived blogging before using Google Reader. What is that one indispensible product/application that you love almost as much as your spouse?