Programs I need!

History will always repeat itself.
My laptop crashed, just in the nick of time where I had to deliver my final thesis, and now I have to rebuild my life again (ok, the last one is an exaggeration :D)

Eerily, the same thing happened almost exactly 4 years ago. And that was around the time I graduated from my master.
Apparently my laptops lifespan are in sync with the length of my study somehow :D

Luckily, my current one is salvageable. So, I am now still typing on my dearest XPS ruby!
And in the process, I've increased my geekiness level by at least 300% or so! xP

J made me learnt how to:
- Examine the back of my laptop, identifying which bolt relates to which part of the laptop.
- Take the HD out (I used a screw driver!! It's astonishingly easy... I thought I'd have to use my full power or something to unscrew those minuscule bolts. And an addition of weak magnet on the tip of the screwdriver is really such a great innovation!)
- Identify whether the failure is in HD or in the other hardware. The chance has it that J installed a bootable version of Ubuntu in a usb drive that I carried around everytime. It really came in handy!

We found that the failure was in the HD. Booted using Ubuntu the laptop ran just fine. And after plugging the laptop to J's desktop, we found that all the data are pretty much intact! *BIG WHEW!* So, all my thesis data are safe and sound.

Alhamdulillah.

- Defragment and shrink a volume, J suggested to just make a new partition in the HD and install a new OS there.

- Install the new OS. J actually wanted me to use unix system. But I still want to live my life and work peacefully... and play my games someday maybe in the future hahaha. So after insisting on installing yet a new windows OS and deleting as much as possible unimportant data (well.. games mostly *sniff sniff*) we secured ourselves 80 GB of free space to be partitioned =D

And now I'm back, installing things from scratch. It's amazing that the list I made in 2008 is mostly still relevant now. The only differences I made this time are :

1. Chrome

I use chrome now. For no particular reasons actually. But J made me used it, and it already saved lots of my passwords :D
I'm still lamenting the non-existence of proper read-it-later extension on chrome though. In firefox the extension would automatically save the content of the link I gave and have it ready for me to be read offline at some other time.

2. notepad++

PSPad got real slow by the time. And it often got stuck in trying to save new files. So I'm trying notepad++ now.

3. Microsoft security essential

The constant nagging of the last AVG for me to download the new version really turned me off. And J suggested this one, so this is what I'm using now.


4. Winmerge

It's a new tool that I come to love and can't live without! I so often keep duplicate copies of a file, just to be safe, and ended up with no knowledge which copy was from which version of that file. This tool really helps me! It's super easy to notice the differences and merge whichever part of one version we feel fit.

5. Skype

Now it's an essential IM for me, because... my parents are using it now for video call! =D
They are marvelous, aren't they! My dad now carries his Ipad everywhere, and are always available for video chat... well, that would be on weekend and on his off hours though :D

And... the rest are still the same with the ones that made to my 2008-must-have-program list. It's kinda amazing, some programs really are just that good to last and stay updated.