Richard,

@Prairie Moon: So if you feel like your HDDs are aging and you want to stretch XP out a bit longer, buy some new drives now. You should get a minimum of 3 years out of a drive. XP will be off life support by then anyway.

@Phoshi: Seconded. Vista was a fantastic OS if you had current hardware.

@5h17h34d: I'll have to see if that works even better. Thanks!

@virgilstar: ShowAnalyzer is a $30 program and seems to be the only program able to analyze the .wtv container to identify commercials. There's a 30-day trial that I've been meaning to take advantage of. I'm willing to spend $30 if it works well since nearly all TV that I watch is recorded by W7MC.

For me, it's a Harmony remote and 2x fast forward. After a little practice, commercials are about 10 seconds.

@Phoshi: 240x128?!? LUCKY!!

@Phoshi: Who you callin "average", bub?

@Nosgoroth: It's true. When resources are in short supply, widgets seem to be more useful— though at the same time, they can compound the problem... I've encountered a system monitor widget that had a memory leak. After a couple days it was eating up a couple hundred megs of ram! :rolleyes

@strich: Yup. Google desktop and Yahoo widgets have held temporary homes on my computer more times than I can count.

@Phoshi: I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'my timetable'. Bing says it may be a Mac app...

I've always felt like system monitor widgets are widgets for the sake of having widgets. Scratch that. I think all widgets are just for the sake of having widgets :P

Back when I dabbled in Ubuntu I always applied a gray and blue theme, so I have no attachment to the brown theme... but now the default looks like a drag queen with no fashion sense. This is a leap in the wrong direction. They would do better to borrow from Mint's color palette.

@SigmundTheSeaMonster: Seriously? Free altoids? Do they still come in the tin? Cuz those things are great as project boxes!

@emag: Oh I know plenty of people that can rationalize their way into debt!

The take away? McDonalds fries are healthy. That's great news!

Desktop received an upgrade some time ago. The laptop is going back to XP as I am selling it. Runs great with W7 though (Aero enabled!). For a 6-7 year old laptop, I was quite impressed!

First thing that came to mind? Firefox jumplist entries to launch different profiles.

NO! NOT MY MUZZLE!! I truly do not care what your status is, gmail contacts...

@spam007: Apple is making sure there are no references to boobies in the code.