Prolonging the magic, part 2
A few days ago I blogged about Paul Thurrots article on about how to extend the life of Windows XP.
Now that I have a new system on my hands, I've played with a few of his suggestions.
Photo management
In the red corner, we have Picasa2 from Google, and in the Redmond corner, we have Windows Photo Gallery, which will be introduced in Vista - perhaps as an answer to iPhoto on the mac, or even to Picasa.
Hands down, Picasa is the winner.
Its faster, its neater, it has cooler transition effects
Searching
Windows desktop search is…well… crap.
It needs to completely replace the standard Windows search to have good integration.
It was much less accurate than Vista's search, which is disappointing
Browser, Spyware, MediaPlayer, Calendar
Firefox (V2 RC2 is nice), Adaware, Winamp and Google Calendar are all great applications that I was already using.
So, summary? A few good applications were thrown in. Other things I haven't 'evaluated' due to the lack of requirements on my behalf (TV tuner), or the fact I wouldn't use them (moviemaker)
Picasa is certainly a nice program, and the rest, well, I was already using them
Hey, try Google Desktop for the search component… it also integrates with GMail and Google Calendar.
You told me yourself that you didn't want to trust Google to indexing your entire hard drive…I'm not exactly going to go on that recommendation :p
eek Google Desktop…got rid of that quick smart
Picasa2 though is awesome and the new integrated Picasa Albums is pretty good too!