As I Xi It v2.3

If you can’t decide on how to rate a photo, you can let a computer do the work!

Click here – ACQUINE

Well, I spent most of the evening installing Windows XP. It was pretty straightforward, just set the netbook to boot from a USB CD-ROM and away I went! Every thing seems to work. Everything apart from the built-in microphone, but that’s not too important since I don’t think I’ll actually use it. If I’m to Skype, I’ll probably use a headset anyway.

Installed all my programs including this new thing called WeFi. It’s quite neat, it tells you where the closest WiFi hotspot(s) is(are) while you’re WiFi-ing about. Also, if your chums are set up for it, you could see where they are and how close or far they are. If you’re often using public hotspots, I highly recommend this little app.

On a separate note, it’s snowing outside. It’s October and its snowing in London. Brrr… I can’t say that this was anticipated.

WordPress appears to have yet another new release.

Still on the trail of a pretty desktop, I installed Yahoo! Widgets. It’s a widget engine where you can download add-on applications to do all sorts of useful stuff like tell you the weather, latest news headlines and other such exciting things. It’s not bad, but everytime I download a new widget, Firefox crashes a few minutes afterwards which can be quite annoying if you’re installing lots of widgets.

Here’s an updated screenshot of my desktop. I’ve got Gorgy Clock, Info 101 and Yahoo! Weather up. I always like to know the weather forecast. There’s a Tube status widget too, but its kinda ugly looking. Note that I’ve managed to find how to hide all my icons (right-click somewhere on the desktop > Arrange Icons By > Hide Desktop Icons).

I’ve been looking through Lifehacker and came across their Windows Desktop Show and Tell article showing some pretty cool looking desktops. They all looked so minimalistic, cool and kinda Mac like. I thought to myself, “I want that” so off I went in search of some icon docking application things.

I tested out two – ObjectDock and RocketDock.

ObjectDock has more bells and whistles than RocketDock. It also needs a minimum of 256MB of RAM to run and 20MB hard drive space whilst RocketDock only needs 10MB and the installation file is 6.20MB. Both of them are visually aesthetic but I opted for RocketDock in the end since it was the lighter weight application.

If you thought a skinned Windows toolbar was cool, this is even cooler!! I’ve shifted my XP toolbar to the top with autohide on. The icon dock sits on the bottom and I’ve autohid that too for more screen real estate. It just pops up when required. Most of the icons on my desktop are gone, all that’s left is My Documents, My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Bluetooth Places and an application I’ve just downloaded. I’m just wondering how to hide them.

I’ve just discovered Microsoft’s SyncToy. It’s a neat little program that basically allows you to synchronise your files. Does exactly what it says. I love it! At the moment I’m using it to syncronise the work files on my desktop with my USB stick.

It’s fairly straightforward to use, so much so that I don’t think there’s anything else I need to say about it.