Sunday, October 02, 2005

The 100 Best Products of 2005

The list is out.

6 comments:

chuck said...

I can second #5, the Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD. As to #26, Ubuntu, I still prefer Fedora or Mepis. I use #1, Firefox, but passed on #2, Gmail...

MeaninglessHotAir said...

For me, #1 Firefox is my constant companion, but I've been flirting with #88 since Syl recommended it. #2 is sometimes the best. I have no opinion down to #16 which is a basic part of life now. I can vouch for #24, 26, 28, 60, and I love #37. I'm thinking I'm gonna start up with #40.

flenser said...

Thanks a lot! Now I feel totally inadequate. I only use one item on the list, Firefox.

I have a six year old 21" CRT monitor that I keep meaning to replace. Maybe for Christmas I'll spring for one of the LCD jobs.

chuck said...

I have a six year old 21" CRT monitor that I keep meaning to replace. Maybe for Christmas I'll spring for one of the LCD jobs.

If you go for the wide screen 24" you'll probably need to upgrade your video card to #20 (6600GT) or better and then check that 'ol power supply to make sure you have 400-450 watts: those new cards can use over 100 watts all by their lonesome. It's a whole wonderful cascade of expenses.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Knucklehead,

I did use ZoneAlarm about 4 years ago and liked it quite a bit at that time. No up to date information though.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Knucklehead,

2 or 3 years ago I moved to an all-Linux system, both at home on the various desktops and laptops, and at work. I almost never come across Windows anymore and I'm not a good authority on it. For chuck's benefit, I'll mention that I'm using about 4 different flavors of Linux at any one time.

My experience, though, is that the design of Windows forces one to wipe the whole hard disk and reinstall from the disk about once a year. I've never known anybody who had a better cleanup system than that.

Last Christmas I cleaned out my son's Windows machine which had over 6,000 various spywares, malwares, etc. installed. Despite spending about 8 hours on it cleaning up the Registry and using all the anti-virus tools I could muster, I found I still couldn't remove one problem without wiping the hard drive. Which I did. When I did, I set up a dual boot Windows/Linux at his request so he could access the Internet without serious risk of infection.

My system at home has a hardware firewall, followed by locked-down turned-on software firewalls on each machine, and everybody has their own account with restricted privileges. Only I am the administrator and then usually only when the system is disconnected from the Internet. Finally, everybody is running Linux and browsers that are not IE. Everything else is too dangerous.