@samgtaylor: Are you, er... are you offended by cold weather?

@able-x: Well that was embarassing. I thought it was referring to those external ports that actually have an optical interface. I once had a sound card with one of those - absolutely never had anything to use it for.

Yes to the phone, the fax, and the optical. (At least, I've never encountered anything that used an optical drive in my time.) Printer and scanner, you are indeed out of your mind. I use my printer frequently [disclosure: I'm a college student], and a scanner is something I don't have and frequently find myself…

@Thorrrr:

@scrimando: Not sure what you mean. It's a ZIP file, so you unzip them, and there they are.

@ashepp: When you edit each pane's properties in Fast Dial, you should see a field for "custom image." From there, you can just select one of the PNG icons you downloaded. And if they're a little blurry, you can do what I did: make a 200x200 black square in Photoshop/GIMP and stick the icon in the middle.

@LeanderPlover: Right-click anywhere on the toolbars and go to "Customize." A window will pop up, allowing you to click and drag elements wherever you want them, on or off the toolbars.

@Yodat: All add-ons will slow down your launch time a little bit. Themes especially. But I'm not running nearly enough extensions to cause any performance lag during use. Fast Dial is 79 kilobytes, and all it actually loads is an HTML file and a couple of thumbnails. Tiny Menu is even smaller - 14 kilobytes to nest…

@sriks7: Aha, I was wondering if anyone would ask about them. Basically, I divide all the ways I use the Internet into one of those three categories.

*bows* :)

I'm really liking Peek. I do have to echo nocode: I'll feel a lot better about the new taskbar if grouping can be disabled. But for the most part - especially if, as people are saying, it isn't as performance-intensive as it looks - I think this is a very strong evolution.

I must say, I like most of what I see.

Hmmmmm.

Vote: 7zip.

Yeah, no. I'm uncannily neat and about as liberal as they come.

Hats off to the victor.

@Sopor42: It's strange how different people's experience can be with viruses. I'm with Fry. I've had this computer for over two years, never installed a third-party firewall, and in that time, I have had exactly one virus.

Wow. I'd have liked my chances before today, but hats off to Dylan. :)

Classy. There's nothing new here, I suppose, and it's a wee bit cluttered for me, but I think you've shown off the strengths of these well-known tools in an extraordinarily tasteful way.

@efeghali: That's pretty much what I thought. I'm not too far out of high school; I know the types who spew that filth, and it's not hard to see them laughing themselves to death as a Stephen Hawking voice recites a litany of "OMG LOL WTF".