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I happened to reinstall the OS on my system (yet again) and there is a set of software that I install after every OS re-install. In fact I have a "Must Have" directory which has all the software's that I use on a day to day basis.

Here is my list of "must have" applications for Windows. I am also mentioning it in the order of install of these applications.

Kaspersky Antivirus

The first thing to do after reinstalling an OS (or before you connect to the Internet) is to install a good Antivirus  and a AntiSpyware application. I currently have a 2 year subscription of Kaspersky and

I am sure many would be surprised with the title of this post. Gmail for one provides with almost 6.6GB of space and its keeps growing every day. It would be amazingly difficult to fill up this space.

Even on the Gmail's home page, you would see this marketing statement:

Over 6628.815124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

So why would anyone want to clean up/delete the mails on his/her Gmail account ?

I for one find it annoying to store unwanted mails; Note that I am not talking of spam mails and referring to marketing mails etc which are genuine but unwanted !

These mails just fill up your pages and

Twitter is a web service which helps you to communicate and stay connected through quick exchange of messages. Its supposedly one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.

Until few days back, accessing Twitter service from iPhone was possible only via the safari web browser. Following are the 4 web based Twitter Clients for iPhone:

Twitter Mobile

Twitter Mobile is the official version of the mobile client. The User interface is basic (hence loads faster) and it lacks a lot of features available on normal web based client.

The following snapshot shows the only 4 options available on the mobile client.

Pocket Tweets

The

Exactly an year back I wrote about moving this blog from GoDaddy to Dreamhost. The story continues and this year I have moved to Media Temple (referral link).

I had considered Media Temple last year, however the site revenues weren't enough to match the rates quoted by Media Temple. Even this time around I thought a lot before choosing  Media Temple. I did see a lot of negative reviews on Media Temple but I guess you would see that for every other hosting provider.

You need to use the service to come to a conclusion and MT does have a 30 day money back guarantee option.

Why shift from Dreamhost ?

WordPress 2.5 was released some days back and I upgraded to the same with some minor hiccups. There were high expectations from me and everybody with respect to the Admin user interface.

I for one was totally disappointed when I found out that the menu items in the interface were taking almost 50% on my 15" widescreen.

Also I found that it was not just me complaining; Many found that the new admin interface was not that user friendly including Dean Robinson who came up with Fluency Admin Theme for WordPress 2.5. The theme moves the main options to a sidebar and the sub-options to the top

WordPress, the publishing platform used for this site just got upgraded to version 2.5. As usual I used the Dreamhost "one click upgrade" and the upgrade to 2.5 was done within minutes. (I love this feature in Dreamhost :) )

However it took more than a few minutes to actually get the site going after the upgrade.

The first major issue was that I could not login to the WordPress Admin Console ! The error message indicated a fatal exception while registering the widgets and hence the dashboard could not be opened.

I knew that the error was related to a WordPress plugin and hence checked on the

A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had "experienced" iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me,

Online Banking has really caught up in India and you rarely see a bank not providing online access to your bank account. However the quality of user experience varies across banks and the same can be said about the security.

ING Vysya Bank, the Indian arm of ING is one example of a crappy online banking portal. Checkout this exception while trying to access the portal:

StringIndexOutOfBoundsException ! hmm .. My complaint is not much on the stack trace print, but on not encapsulating this message in a meaningful string.

I for one like the way Citibank handles exceptions, you just get a message saying "We

The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn't upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista.

The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue screen and a system restart. I even booted from the Vista DVD and got into the command console (using Alt + F10 on the License screen) and tried updating the BIOS using command line; again blue screen followed by a system restart !!

After digging through some forums I realized that the BIOS could only be updated via XP which meant

Ah.. the day I have been waiting for ! Windows Vista SP1 has been finally released via windows update today !

I upgraded to Vista last year and there were a few issues bugging me including the file copy to external drives, WiFi connectivity, Printer Connectivity etc.

Few of the issues were addressed by patches and few of them were also fixed when I upgraded to the beta release of Vista SP1. With today's final release of SP1 I am hoping that MS has addressed all the reported issues in Vista.

Vista SP1 details:

You can download the SP1 via Windows update; Note that if