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I've been using Vern for a number of years with good success. Much better than the MS powertoy, and easier than having to deal with Litestep.

I've been using Vern (Virtual Environment Resource Navigator) for many years now. I'm not sure how he handles doing the virtual desktops but it works quite well. I run a 4x4 grid so I have 16 virtual desktops and I put one application per window. (Granted I rarely use all 16 simultaneously.) I've only encountered a few programs that refuse to stay on their desktop and display on all of them, and nothing I use regularly does that. (Excluding Rainlander but I want it to be on all desktops. I had to set my clock widgit with the Yahoo! Widgit Engine to stay sticky.) Vern reminds me a lot of the pager I used in FVWM back when I was in college. I've always preferred that style pager vs the one in Gnome/KDE so I'm quite happy with it. I definitely recommend you give it a try if you've been wanting decent virtual desktops on Windows.

That'a pretty old copy of Vern - the homepage is http://www.oneguycoding.com/vern/

This is an absolute essential for any (windows) computer of mine, and among the best 20 bucks I've ever spent.

-A

• Vern — virtual desktops (screenshot)
• StrokeIt — system-wide, customizable mouse gestures (screenshots)
• X-Setup — mind-numbingly detailed tweaking (screenshots)
• Cygwin — *nix-like commandline environment (screenshot would be silly)

These are the basic things I would require regardless of what kind of project I was working on. There are probably another half a dozen or so programs I would almost always install (Process Explorer, Firefox, Putty, KeePass), but these are more likely to be subject to individual preferences.

Have you thought of something like Vern? There are a zillion other virtual desktop programs for Windows out there, but this has been my favorite for years. It makes overwhelming the task bar a non-issue. I can just keep Sunbird maximized on a separate desktop. Here's a screenshot (see the bottom right corner) to show how useful it can be. Why clutter the system tray even more when you can just leave all of your windows exactly where you want them to be?

Your mileage may vary, but I hope you find this useful.

There seems to be a very active development community and a corresponding wealth of plugins. Plugins aimed at making playing music on a computer a better experience, not ones aimed at making your music player more eye-catching or fun to use.

If you share my feelings but are on linux instead, check out mpd and mpc.

Gator's programs are not pure spyware because they at least provide some level of functionality. The first Gator offering was a personal-info remembering "wallet" that'd nicely fill in web forms similar to what the Google Toolbar's AutoFill feature offers.

Another one of their schemes offers to download a program that will automatically sync your system time, which is useful to most people who notice that consumer PCs are usually pathetic at keeping a system time. However, I personally use the adware-free Automachron which provides the same useful function.

So, they're really a bait-and-switch operation. They actively market utilities that people want, and are rather trivial to make.... and then tag-on their adware code for the ride. Better options for all of their offerings exist, but the public often doesn't know where to go.

In the interest of multiple opinions, I like Automachron. It's a lot smaller than NetTime (130KB vs. 2MB) and is also unobtrusive. You can make it invisible or stick it in your system tray.

Here's a screenshot of it running on my system.

You're absolutely right about offsite network backup though, it is definitely the way to go. Only you'd be nuts to use scp to do this, try rsync if you don't want to backup your entire home account every day. I do this on two systems and since I'm only syncing the changes my backups are on the order of 2 or 3 MB uploaded per day. This is a great, first line of defence (in case one accidentally deletes a file, or, ahem, subdirectory tree, or ones entire system gets toasted.

rsync -v --stats -xrlptgoD --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh --exclude-from=sync-out.exc /home/me me@remote:~/me-at-home

Real men like command line switches.

Of course, this is only a single copy. What is really needed is a good network differential backup system.

One guy (hah!) has a start on it,

dbak.pl this is a perl script that attemtps to do network differential backups. It's rough around the edges but with a bit of work ...

I've used vern for virtual desktops on every PC I've used for a few years now, that covers 95/98/NT4/2K and now XP, on a variety of hardware. Give it a spin - not perfect but pretty good.

I've used VERN and BLANCH, shareware from One Guy Coding, for a couple of years now.

I've used VERN and BLANCH, shareware from One Guy Coding, for a couple of years now.

I've used VERN and BLANCH, shareware from One Guy Coding, for a couple of years now.