I'm doing a photo project and have to do some light editing and showing photos to others. My current software is extremely old and while they have been maintaining it, for whatever reason it's ludicrously slow. Flipping from one photo to another on a quad core modern machine with 8GB of RAM takes 2+ seconds. It's years past when I should have replaced it.

I looked around a bit and, surprisingly, decided on ACDSee Ultimate 9. It's very fast, has good organizational tools, and has enough functionality similar to Adobe Lightroom that I'll likely not need anything else to do the kind of editing that I do. The latest version even does layered editing.

Also I need to learn some 3D modelling software apart from OpenSCAD. It was tempting to try Solidworks since I can get a license via FIRST Robotics, but in the end I decided to play with Autodesk Fusion 360, it seems to be what all the cool Makers are using. Seems pretty powerful and a little more open than I was expecting.

As discussed on the GT list, lastpass.com - a very well thought out and complete and seemingly pretty darn secure password storage system. Your passwords are stored at their server though in encrypted form (they get encrypted before leaving your PC, using a password that never leaves your PC, so they can't find out your passwords). There are plugins for all major browsers on all major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) plus versions for every current smartphone platform, plus portable versions for running from a thumb drive or locally (data still encrypted). There's a version in their paid package that supports passwords for non-web-based systems, though I just use an encrypted note to hold my truecrypt passwords.

If you are using a browser with the plug-in installed, and you're logged in (click the * icon, type in your master password, you're logged in), user IDs and passwords are just automatically entered for you. And there are multiple interfaces where you can see and edit passwords and other info, and again, the stuff is encrypted everywhere except on your own computer or device.

I have note entries with all the emergency "stolen card" info for all my credit cards. It has pre-defined forms for things like credit cards, driver's licenses, etc.

It can generate one-time passwords, I have 5 of them printed out and on a piece of paper in my wallet. With them I can access the site from a public PC like a library, and if the password is sniffed with a key sniffer, doesn't matter, the password only works one time. So if I lose my wallet I just need to get web access somewhere to get the info to cancel/replace cards.

You can set up common web form info such as shipping address, etc, and click on it to auto-fill as much form data as possible.

There's a bunch of other stuff too but I haven't gotten into it that far yet.

Windows 7
Firefox
- Adblock Plus
- NoScript
- Leetkey
- ForecastFox
- Download Statusbar
Microsoft Security Essentials
Transmission Remote (for torrents)
Putty (SSH client)
Pidgin (IM client)
TrueCrypt
PasswordSafe
SkyTools 3 Pro
OpenOffice
PIE (Picture Information Extractor - photo organizer)
GIMP
Pinnacle Studio (video editing)
VirtualDub (video swiss army knife)
FoxIt PDF reader
7Zip
QuickPAR (data recovery)
CDeX (CD ripper)
MP3Tag
Songbird (music database/sync tool)
VLC (media player)
ConTEXT (text/programmer's editor)
ImgBurn (CD/DVD burn software)
PDFCreator
VirtualBox (to run XP inside for connecting to work)
Virtual Clonedrive (CD ISO mount software)
Personal Ancestry File (Genealogy - freeware from LDS)
PDFTK Builder
Audacity
YAWCAM (webcam broadcasting software)

MP3 codec
XviD codec

hardware:
scanner
printer
webcam

I'd been using DSynchronize to mirror my directories for the last few months. However, yesterday I got a 1.5T drive to replace a 1T drive, which is destined to replace the 160 and 250G drives in the family machine, which are filling up.

I tried to use DSynchronize to copy the data from the 1T to the 1.5T. It did about 80 of the 950 gigabytes of data on that drive, and said "OK, done." I ran it multiple times and checked all the settings, and it happily maintained that the data had been all properly copied.

Anyway, now that I'm on Win 7, I have another option, which works very well; robocopy. It's a command line tool that ships with Vista and 7. I guess it was available to XP too with the resource kit, but I never realized that for some reason.

Anyway, I verified it this time and when it was done, both drives had exactly the same number of folders, files, and bytes used.

I'm running Firefox 3 Beta 4 (it's in the dev tree, not really released yet - I want to play with the new Canvas extensions).

It's fast. It's faster than Opera, faster than IE, faster than Firefox 2. Rendering is way faster, Javascript is faster, everything I've tried is faster than any of the others.

Memory usage seems about the same. Just having it running sucks down about 45 megs, but I can open a dozen windows and it hardly budges. I can open a window with simple Javascript on it, and it doesn't budge. Opening GMail immediately runs it up to 69 megs; Google has a big Javascript library that loads up. I'll keep an eye on it, to see if the memory use creeps up.

Plugins aren't generally supporting it yet; none of my plugins had compatible versions (ForecastFox, TamperData, AdBlock Plus, CacheViewer, Download Statusbar, Leet Key, Web Developer.

When you shut it down, it has the "do you want to save your tabs for next time you start up?" question, like I guess Opera does.

I'd say to wait a while, they'll certainly stomp a few bugs or memory leaks out, but it looks like they've cleaned and speeded things up quite a bit, when it's released it'll be worth the upgrade (once your "required" extensions are updated).