One of the snazziest things Windows Vista adds to the GUI interface is Live Taskbar Thumbnails; graphical snapshot previews of closed windows laying on your taskbar. For anyone that has many windows open all the time, sometimes finding the window you want when you want it takes a little time. With Vista, all you have to do is hover your mouse over a closed window on the taskbar and *POP!* up comes a thumbnail preview of the sucker. It’s a timesaver (a few seconds but hey they add up), it’s functional and better yet, it’s *shudder* COOL!

If you’re using Windows XP (and most of you out there are) and are saddened that you don’t have this cool feature, worry not. Now you do with a tiny little utility called Visual Task Tips. I’m pretty much known for using tiny apps to do great things and this sucker passes my functionality/size test. Small but wonderous, time saving and cool-looking. Win-win-win! Aaaa-rooooogaaaa!!!

If you want to add the same functionality (thumbnail previews) when surfing the web, you can use Firefox, Seamonkey or Opera. These tabbed browsers (available on many operating systems) offer preview snapshots of web pages when you hover your mouse over a tab.

Both Visual Task Tips and these browsers go great together. I use VTT and Seamonkey myself and no matter what I’m looking for (a web site or a minimized window) all I have to do is hover my mouse over the sucker in question and pop goes the wease–er– snapshot.

Oh, and if you’re a thumbnail preview maniac, replace your crummy, boring XP ALT-TAB with TaskSwitch XP Pro 2.0 like I did and you too can be the cool geek on your block… (if there is such a thing.)

I don’t like To Do lists because they’re comprised totally of things you have yet to do. I’m an achiever and To Done Lists look a whole lot better. So here’s my To Done List of things I did this past week:

Watch Spider Man 3…. done
Change Wireless Router/Cards from Open Access to WPA2 encryption… done
Start to get Farscape from Blockbuster Online… done
Get stamp to send out Ultra rebate… done (41cents? Argh!)
Send out Rebate for Ultra 600w Power Supply (Cost: $15 AR)… done
Become Astonished that 98% of Reviews for movie Pan’s Labyrinth fail to note it’s in Spanish… done
Be glad I didn’t go see it in the theatres… done
Give Digital Recorder to Radio Shack for free repair… done
Try a new straight to DVD Recorder so now I can tape 2 shows at the same time to DVD… done
Send away for $250 check from Chase for trying their new Freedom Card (sweet deal!)… done
Clean glasses… done
Eat at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill w/Mom, Dad, Brother and Sister (best fine dining experience in Vegas)… done
Watch Mom, Dad, Brother and Sis drive away to go to Grand Canyon… done
Sit back, relax at home and enjoy the peace and quiet while they’re all gone… done (mournful sigh) drat
Change Digg Bookmark to All Stories instead of tech… done
Listen to my iPod Nano thru my iHome using my eArs… done
Type post using Haphazard capitalization… done
Tape last missed Battlestar Galactica episode… done
Tape last missed Heroes episodes… done
Wipe everything off my brother’s Windows ME laptop and install XP Pro on it… WTF?! How the hell did I get stuck with this job?! ARRGHHHH! FAMILY SUX!
Configure laptop so brother can’t mess it up… not $%#@!ing possible
Finish my To Done List and post it here… done

So what’s on your To Done list, peoples?

Hope you all remembered. Otherwise…

With today’s complex computers nothing beats having it chock full of parts that have lifetime warranties. Or as long a warranty as possible (in the case of chips and hard drives.) While you can’t make an entire state-of-the-art killer rig with 100% lifetime warrantied parts, you can at least make sure that your RAM, video card and power supply are covered for life (well, as long as you or the companies exist.)

Thanks to increased competition over the years, more parts that make up a system are covered with lifetime warranties. RAM (system memory) companies were the first to introduce such a guarantee because unless the user did something stupid like rub it across a shag carpet, it hardly ever went poof.

Then video card manufacturers like BFG got into the game with lifetime warranties for their expensive high-end overclocked versions of consumer graphics cards. Over time other video card manufacturers like XFX and EGA (as well as others) followed suit. Soon these companies expanded the lifetime guarantees to all their cards, which was great for the consumer, I’ll tell ya.

Later, power supply makers like Ultra covered their supplies with lifetime warranties too (as long as you register it on their website.) So that was one more part that was covered and protected in case of failure.

The good thing about companies that offer lifetime warranties for their products are that by and large their parts are comparable in price to products made by others that have limited warranties. So you’re not paying extra for those lifetime guarantees either like you were back in the day when RAM was REAL expensive and only a few companies were offering such coverage.

Having as many parts in your computer that have lifetime coverage is a great deal, since you’re not paying extra for the parts, why not make sure that if they fail you can get a free replacement? (Well yeah, you usually have to pay the shipping back to the company but its not expensive to do so.) It just makes sense.

Besides lifetime guarantees, it’s always a good bet to purchase computer parts with as long a warranty as possible.

While chip makers like Intel and AMD do not have lifetime warranties, usually if you wait for a good deal you can buy the retail chip for just a tad more than the OEM version (which has a 90 day warranty usually) and in doing so get a 3 year warranty.

Another good bet are Seagate hard drives which come with 5 year warranties (the longest currently in the industry for regular buyers) or Maxtors with 3 year coverage.

Recently my power supply gave up the ghost after about 15 months and Ultra replaced it for free (minus my cost to ship it - duh). The good news is that the power supply had a 3 year warranty (not a lifetime because I forgot to register it on their site - double duh) and even better the power supplies they send in return are brand new FULL RETAIL boxed replacements. With full warranties. So I went from a now-used, dead, only-covered 3 years power supply to a brand new lifetime covered power supply! Well worth the $9 to ship the dead unit out, I’ll tell you. See, since the replacement is a retail new supply, Ultra covers it as such and as long as you remember to register it on their site it has lifetime coverage.(I confirmed this too to be sure.) Sweet deal!

Shame monitors, motherboards, speakers, keyboards and mice don’t carry lifetime coverage but still it’s always best to get the longest warranty possible (and in the case of LCDs the lowest dead-pixel return policy) to protect your computing investment as much as possible. Also, if you look around you can even find computer cases that offer lifetime protection as well.

So… do you have any lifetime computer components in your system? What?

(And now with that wise bit of consumer advice out of the way, I promise the next post will have ‘crazy talk.’)

I’m stoked! My brother and sister (his wife) arrived in Vegas yesterday. Which means I’ll be seeing a lot of them while seeing way too much of these (see pic). It’s going to be fun for the next two weeks hanging out and having fun. Taking time off from work is great and I’ll use any excuse to do so; but this reason is great! See you guys in 2 weeks…

Now that my self-imposed torture of daily blogging is over (thank you month of April for ending) I can take a rest from trying to remember each and every day if I had posted something on my blog. It felt like… a… a… *shudder* job! (ugh!) I felt so… so… dirty. Unclean. No matter how long I stayed under the shower or scrubbed I just couldn’t remove the stain daily blogging left on my soul. (Side note: Macbeth spot quote from Act V, Scene 1 purposely not referenced so as to not confuse the products of today’s school system)

Please note the singular form of shower as I am of Italian descent. No, not French… I don’t use perfume to mask the natural musk of a healthy, virile male of the species. What’s that adopted sisters? Yeah, yeah, with lithe, girlie wrists ha!ha!ha! That’s so I can get my hand in tight plac– nevermind!

As I was saying I’m happily done with my immersion into the world and psyche of the daily blogger (ie blogospherians, plague of society, scourge of society, boil on the a$$ of society not to mention we’re better off without them in society.) But I do see the reason why these people, if we can call them that, and man am I trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, do what they do. The more they post, the more chance someone will read what they say. The more chance someone reads, the more they might comment on what they’ve read. Like to quote Oedipus: “MY EYES! MY EYES! AAAARRRGGHH! THE PAIN!! THE PAIN!!! *jab* *jap* *jab* ahhhhh, that’s better… *bonk* “OW!OW!OW! Who put that ^&%$@ing marble table over there?! Ow! Did someone douse all the torches it’s so dark in here…”

See, the daily blogger wants and craves attention. Web traffic. Comments. Anyone that drops by, even by accident. The more they post, the more people might comment, the more people might even talk to them without tossing the tradition rock or tar and feather combo.

Last month I posted 31 times (once a day, twice on the last day) and received 270 comments; an average of 8.7096774193548387096774193548387 comments per post. Which is about 8.7096774193548387096774193548385 more comments per post than 99.9999999999999999999999999999998% of the daily bloggers out there.

So you see, as the theory goes you can see why someone who craves attention so much would fall into the false notion of becoming a daily blogger to be more popular. Unfortunately the evidence is clear that the only thing they will become more popular at is being a nuisance; needlessly cluttering up the web with tons of meaningless tripe which gunks up everyone’s search results and still they usually don’t have commenters to speak of, or readers.

The reason it worked for me? I’m me. The reason it doesn’t work for them – they’re not me. See, I failed miserably at becoming just like a daily blogger last month because apparently I couldn’t shut down enough of my brain to post like them and yet still live. People (1) liked what they read, (2) found the posts to be funny and (3) insightful. Three things you won’t find in a daily blogger’s posts. E-V-E-R! *sigh*

So I succeeded at failing and worse I just might have encouraged those that I loathe to embark on the quest to become more popular by being a daily blogger. They’re not that bright so they just might not understand that by succeeding, I failed and am not the example to follow here. But, there is an up-side if they do… those genes won’t be in any pool.

And now you know…