I gave the girls a new computer for xmas. It’s a fairly simple machine, duo core Emachine, with plenty of memory, disk, etc.

There are two things that have really got me annoyed though.  Looking at the list of processes that are running by default on the machine, I have got to wonder why anyone even bothers with a launch Icon anymore.  Everything appears to be preloading into memory, at the expense of everything else.  For example, I’ve quicktime task manager loading, as well as a ton of AOL processes, none of which I use.  MS Office is loading some stuff as well, but the kicker is that I haven’t even loaded MS Office.  Simply amazing.

The reason a lot of this junk is loading is simple, they want the application to look like it’s loading fast.  So preload lots of the basic functions, hence it will be all ready should you ever click the launch icon.  So on the odd chance that I decide to try out AOL some time 6 months from now, I’ll be ready to roll. 

For those of you who don’t know it, you can go to run and type in msconfig and edit the stuff that is being run at startup.  My advice is to only do a few items at a time, and only those that you have a pretty good idea what they are, like anything that has “AOL” in the file name, if you don’t use AOL. 

Another thing that’s really annoyed me is IE7 – it’s slow, seems to crash for no good reason and generally is a PITA.  I’ve solved that problem for the girls – their now using Firefox. 

I need to use IE7 for site testing.  So I was very excited to see the Web Developer toolbar you can download.  I use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar all the time, particularly it’s “edit css” function which lets me test my changes on the fly.  So I fired up the IE7 Developer Bar, and find it’s got virtually no functionality.  A DOM inspector?  How about simply reduplicating the functionality of the Firefox Web Developer toolbar guys?