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When pulsar tweeted about SmartDefrag I immediately downloaded it and let the installer rot away until I tried it now.

Looks really decent so far, C:\ from ~45% to ~30% in 20min without impact on the performance. At least for me Windows Defrag makes the computer quite unusable normally :P

When I browsed IObit's website, I also stumbled upon Game Booster and although all the cool kids seem to prefer console gaming these days, I'll stick with my SNES+GBA+PC combo for the time being.
This tool advertises to improve gaming by shutting down services you don't need, so I went through the usual forums and searched for some reports on it. The general consensus ranged from "brilliant" to "useless, but still not harmful", so I gave it a shot. Much to my surprise the only optimizations it suggested were:
- WebClient
- Server
- close some running apps

WebClient seemed to be a safe bet to disable anyway, so I went to manually disable it, but I have file and printer shares, so the second one was no option. The third one showed me that again I had 2 new apps in Autostart, quite annoying. Going to disable them manually as well.

So in general I'm quite surprised as I seemed to have optimized my rig at some point and forgot about it. Whatever, will try Game Booster on another 1-2 machines as I'm curious about XP and Vista default settings.

After stumbling across this list, I figured it would be handy to have my current list handy again for reference, so here it is. Can't even remember when and where I posted this the last time, guess it's been some years already... (update: old blog post (in German))

Starting with part 1 - Windows Software (with part 2 and 3 being Linux and coding tools):

• T-Clock is still one of the first tools to be installed on a fresh system. The Windows clock has to show day of the week, date and time in a custom format for me.
• Miranda for ICQ and Jabber, it's been quite some years since I last used the original ICQ client. Guess it was even before anyone knew Jabber.
• ClipX is a clipboard history manager, nothing more, nothing less. ctrl+shift+v brings me a list of the last 20 items in the clipboard. I have no clue how I ever managed to work without it.
• RocketDock is my replacement for the Windows Quicklaunch bar, the start menu, desktop icons and Litestep. A simple dock to put icons in it - in a space-saving way in the bottom right corner of my secondary monitor. Before this I used AquaDock and Launchy.
• ÜberIcon is a fun little tool made by the creators of aforementioned RocketDock. Pointless eyecandy :)
• KVIrc is my IRC client of choice after having tried and gotten rid of like anything on the market: mIRC, Klient, HydraIRC, dIRC, Nettalk, XiRCON+Kano, bersirc, pIRCh, Visual IRC, ksirc, X-Chat.
• PuTTY tray, which is basically PuTTY with a few more features.
• FileZilla is my successor to both SmartFTP and WinSCP
• Notepad2 is my replacement for MS Notepad, Koolpad, Metapad, ConTEXT, UltraEdit, theGUN and of course SciTE - it's also using Scintilla.
• foobar2000 after they finally gave in to include an easily accessible volume button. Successor to Winamp 2. I have no clue what version it was, but I first used it in late 1997 along with my very first bunch of like 100 mp3s that nearly filled my harddisk back then.
• GOMPlayer since MPC wasn't developed anymore (see below).
• TrueCrypt for.. well... encrypting stuff.
• FoxitReader since Adobe's Acrobat Reader is a synonym for bloat.
• I'm using Firefox since it was called Firebird. Don't ask for a version number, though. Most important plugins (and that's also nearly the complete list...) are NoScript, ServerSpy, Download Statusbar, TabMixPlus, FlashGot, LongTitles and Adblock Plus.
• Using Thunderbird since some 0.x version, after being fed up with Outlook Express, Eudora and some other tool I used for years but totally forgot the name... Only real addons are Enigmail for GPG and Folderpane Tools to rearrange accounts.
• 7-ZIP after a longer period of working with PowerArchiver 6 (the old freeware version).
• Paint.net - a free image editor with enough functions to mimic photoshop for home use - mostly.

These were the day-to-day programs, but there's much more rotting in my famous D:\Apps\ - the stuff that's copied from each Windows reinstall to the next, sometimes over years.

• Azureus 2, because I didn't find any other Bittorrent client that could match it and version 3 had some thing I didn't like, if only I could remember.. not using it very much.
• popcorn is the smallest possible email client I can think of. Great for testing stuff, for example connect to pop3, only load headers and kill that nasty mail choking your account when on dialup.
• TCPView, Process Explorer, Autoruns made by Sysinternals and bought by Microsoft are simple and useful.
• SequoiaView to check for wasted diskspace.
• CDEx to create mp3s
• The Font Thing is a small tool not updated for over 7 years that simply displays a customizable text in all fonts in a directory, installed, etc...
• Opera, still better than IE imho - although IE7 was a huge step towards usable again after IE5.

Honorable mention of not using it anymore, but my favourites for a longer time:

• Rainlendar - a desktop calendar
• KeyNote - keeping notes, also encrypted
• media player classic
• Weaverslave - sadly not updated anymore, was my html and php editor of choice for some years.