Crash (but not burn)

Got a new PC at work today. Okay, it's not really new per se, it's pre-owed. It's an older Dell Latitude with a 1.3 Ghz processor and a 60 gig hard drive. Not top of the line, but the old machine I was using had like a 700 Mhz processor. We're not exactly at the bleeding edge here — I'm still running Win2KPro, but that's okay, Win2k is basically XP minus the memory hogging (just make sure you have antivirus software and a firewall…).

Anyway, my first act: to crash the computer. Twice. It turns out that it happened because I was trying to run an installer off of network (hey, I've done it before!). A good feeling, nevertheless.

Anyway, the computer was in pretty bad shape, so here's what I did:

• First act: installed Firefox, 7-Zip, Crimson Editor and PDFCreator, four indispensible windows apps
• Second: disable all of the taskbar junk. No, I don't want the machine to constantly monitor for new photos. Sometimes this requires downloading MSCONFIG. If you're on XP, you don't have to worry about it (just hit ctrl+r and type msconfig), but Win2k doesn't come with it

I'm trying to resist the tempation to install OOo, LaTeX, Gretl, Gimp and every other app under the sun, because I'm not really going to use them.

The best part about all of this: bigger monitor + faster machine = more productivity.

Update: I think my iBook knows that I'm cheating on it. When I got home, it went all kernel panicky on me. That's the iBook version of saying "Who is she?"