Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Here's hoping for a fantastic 2010!

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

Enjoy the time off, whatever your plans!

Rebuilding a PC: Why?

How often should you rebuild your PC? What kicks it off for you?

Is it proactive? For example:

• Length of time since last key event
• Amount of data
• Previously determined OS attempt

Or is it reactive?

• Due to performance?
• Perceived slowness?
• Hardware failure?

The key is to know why you're doing it. Not all reactivity is bad (hardware failure, for example, you can't control or really prevent).

However, what if it's a server? How often do you rebuild things, even just the OS? Yes, I know up-time is king. I do.

However, if you can unlock more efficiencies through an OS upgrade, why don't you? Why not be proactive?

Rebuilding a PC: SyncToy

Although it didn't make the original list, one of the things I really missed during my Ubuntu adventure was SyncToy, from Microsoft.

It allows me to run all sorts of "choose your own" style backups, and make them as deep or simple as I want. This is good.

What it doesn't do is perhaps work more complicated, or have fancy feedback styled logging with pretty beautiful error output.

I don't care. It's free, it works, and I like its simplicity.

Find it here at Microsoft.

Rebuilding a PC: Firefox

In rebuilding Firefox, nearly everything I need is built in. However, since I am really NOT a fan of editing Firefox's about:config by hand, I adore the addon Tab Mix Plus.

You can find it here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/1122


And the developer's website is over here:

http://tmp.garyr.net