The straw that broke the camel’s back

I realize that I never explained what caused me to jump ship from Ubuntu to Vista. Strangely enough, it was because of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8. In my professional and personal life, I work with PDF documents a lot and ever since I discovered the built-in OCR abilities of the Adobe Acrobat Pro version, I have gotten really used to tweaking and editing PDF documents to suit my whims. With Ubuntu, I did not want to install WINE which would have enabled me to run certain Windows applications on the Linux operating system. So, I enabled the Medibuntu Repositories on my Ubuntu installation and installed the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Well, there is a world of difference between the Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Adobe Acrobat Professional version. It only took a day of having to repeatedly type up a certain form and I decided that my experiment for Ubuntu would have to be delayed until I have another system to ‘play’ with. 🙂 This reformat of my laptop took place last week Saturday (03/14/2009) and I don’t regret the decision just yet.

However, this may change as I’m currently being subjected to the same old finicky nature of Windows. Right now, I’ve got my important programs installed. Vista’s Performance Information and Tools monitor tool tells me that there aren’t any issues affecting performance. I run the ‘Disk Cleanup‘ tool rather frequently and my laptop is set to defrag on a weekly schedule. See pics after the  jump. *sigh*
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FeedDemon 2.8 RC1 is out, Snagit 9.1 is in and more

Well, well, Whaddaya know! FeedDemon 2.8 Release Candidate 1 is out and it now contains ads. Wow. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet with switching to RSS Bandit. Seriously, none of the applications on my laptop contains ads simply because: (a) they’re free or (b) I paid for them. FeedDemon used to be shareware i.e. free for 30 days and about $30 to register. I paid for FeedDemon back then and was ecstatic when they made it a free program because it freed me from having to pay for upgrades. Now, the author of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury, feels the need to insert ads into this product because they need a source of revenue. That’s his prerogative. I’ll install FeedDemon on my Windows XP Pro SP3 virtual machine and see what the hubbub is about. In any case, I don’t think I’m going back to FeedDemon till I read about serious rss-bandit-quibbleimprovements in the stability & handling all sorts of feeds. So far, beyond some minor User Interface gripes, I’m liking my switch to RSS Bandit. Whenever I click “mark all feeds read”, it happens without locking up and forcing me to use Windows Task Manager to kill the process unlike *cough* FeedDemon *cough* 😀 On a serious note, it’s not all roses with RSS Bandit though. Here’s one of  my pet peeves in the picture on the right. Continue reading FeedDemon 2.8 RC1 is out, Snagit 9.1 is in and more