How about just being disciplined and putting things back in the *same* place each and every time? Keys go in right-hand desk of study drawer. Passports, birth certificates, social security cards etc. go in manilla folder labeled "ID" in your filing cabinet. And so on.

I still don't quite see why you'd want to install Cygwin in the first place. I have a native Windows 'grep' so that's catered for already. I can't see any good reason to want to run "ls -l" (or variant thereof). I use SysInternal process utilities so 'ps' is no use to me.

The March 2008 edition of Popular Science has an article on replacing the TiVo HD's default 160 GB drive with two 750 GB drives for 200 hours of HD (or 1,900 hours of SD). Page 76, entitled "Supersize Your TiVo". Cost=$557, time=2 hours. It uses WinMFS. The article does not appear to be on their web-site yet.

I'm a big fan of alum stones. Cheap and effective. Reduces those red bumps on your neck big time, and closes cuts.

I'd recommend a kid-friendly mouse. There are a bunch available that have fun designs and work by squeezing rather than clicking small buttons. Much easier and less frustrating for young kids to use. For example KidzMouse.

I've read that the technique used is to replay a song in fast-forward mode, taking a copy of the audio track, using a process similar to that used to 'rip' a CD to a computer. Which would explain the 5% loss.

I can recommend color-coding emails from certain senders via Tools | Organize | Using Colors. Makes it a lot easier to distinguish Bob's emails from Sue's.

@rfjason: Do you mean "import"? I was under the impression that the current Thunderbird can import from Outlook PSTs. It's a one-time import of all messages from a PST to Thunderbird's message store. Or are you looking for Thunderbird to be able to manipulate PSTs on the fly (and hence there would be no need to import…

Yet another 'placeshifting' solution to a problem that, for me at least, simply does not exist. Kind of like SlingBox. I must be so living in the 80's to not recognize & appreciate the utility of these things.

I've never once used a speed dial on any cell-phone I've ever owned. I prefer to flip open the phone and just talk to it: "Call Home", "Call Ron Paul", "Call Massage Parlor", stuff like that.

If AHK is a registered file extension and you have "Hide extensions for known file types" enabled (the default) then renaming a file on XP is quite safe.

Top tip: wear pantyhose over your head and face when going to the bank — you'll get much faster service.

There's no way I'm going to sit there for hours uploading CDs and flash drive contents to a car's hard drive. I think I'd prefer a standard multi-disk cd/dvd-changer (n.b. that can read music from higher-capacity DVD) plus an auxiliary input (hidden away) for a USB flash drive.

@monkeyboy: Believe that Home Premium and Ultimate provide Media Center features. Check out this comparison over at Microsoft.

@markwms: @Michael Wales: Handy tip, thanks!

This looks useful. It's always bugged the hell out of me that Outlook's auto-complete offers me email addresses that are no longer in my contact list and are no longer valid. Many a time I've sent emails to old, bad email addresses because of this stupid feature and have never found a way to remove those old…

Electronic books was a failed notion from day one, if you ask me. About as sensible as electronic socks.

Bizarre. A solution in search of a problem?

This looks so much better than the previous version. This one lets you group, and subgroup, SSH sessions easily while the previous version did not (because of some limitation in the way that putty stores its connection info in the registry).

Er, does anyone actually use this type of feature? Beyond the first couple of "ooh aah" moments.