Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Curmudgeon

The thing I like most about Windows is the ability to continually improve the computing experience by tweaking settings in programs and by adding programs that accomplish specialized tasks. Microsoft Word has been great at allowing me to get rid of icons I don't regularly use and replace them with ones that are more appropriate for my needs. You can write some impressive macros and attach them to a toolbar button. For example, my sister uses Juno.com for her email and her messages have hard returns on every line. She uses paragraph indents rather than using whitespace between paragraphs. I have a toolbar macro that reformats the entire email so that it is much easier for me to read. One click and it's instantly done. The macro is actually a procedure that is automatically written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

Some of the most useful, troublefree software is freeware and shareware. The software is never bloated and its producers are much more responsive than the big guys. The latest PC magazine has an article on "The Best Free Software". Because it is so much easier to access these programs to try out from the web, I googled for the web page with all the links. Before I arrived at pcmag.com, I came across this web page:


http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm#19

Before long I had found a gem of a desktop search program called X1. I've only been using it for a short time and it really appeals to me. It is extremely customizable and lets me do what I want to do. This is, by far, the best desktop search program I've seen. I've tried Google Desktop Search, and several others and had settled on Copernic. But I like X1 a lot better. In my initial testing, I found quite a few gems hiding in plain site on my hard disks.

http://www.x1.com

Sometimes it hard to be a curmudgeon.