Found this great utility through Scott Watermasysk's blog: Startup Delayer. I quote:

When Windows loads it's [sic] Startup file, it attempts to load every program in there at the same time. Therefore if you have quite a lot of programs starting when Windows starts, each program will try and grab CPU time so that it can load.

If each program tries to do this at the same time, you soon notice the slow down that occurs, due to your CPU trying to help all the programs to load, and your hard disk accessing multiple files.

Startup Delayer allows you to setup how many seconds after Windows has started, to load each program.

Works just as advertised. Just configure it to get those slow loading applications (Skype anyone?) to load up at a later time and save your quad-core from thrashing.

You can configure it to just work in the background, or with a visual GUI:

There's even an auto-config option to have everything in your startup menu startup at a set interval (say 10 seconds). Couldn't be easier or more effective so definitely worth the download (and works on XP and Vista).

Back in June I posted about how to get Hit-a-Hint to work with Firefox 3.*. HaH is a Firefox extension that aims to make web surfing with a keyboard as usable as possible. However, HaH is no longer under active development (which actually was the impetus for the June post as it needed some tweaks just to get it to work with newer versions of Firefox).

But now there's a replacement! A new extension on the block, LoL, is a new and improved fork of HaH (and although I am a Nerd, I don't know why it's called LoL because I don't know what it would have to do with laughing out loud - can anybody enlighten me?). It's got everything HaH had, but also provides user-configurable keys and the ability to "intercept" link clicks with the space bar. Of course, it also work with Firefox 3 right out of the virtual box. Check out the developer's site at http://elder-gods.org/lol/. Thanks Larry!

UPDATE: Installer (link below) updated to work with Firefox 3.1

UPDATE: LoL is a new and improved fork of HaH

Peter let us know this morning that several indispensable Firefox add-ons are now compatible with Firefox 3 RC1:

• Firebug 1.2 beta
• Del.icio.us bookmarks 2.0.48 beta
• Web developer toolbar 1.1.6 already compatible
• AI Roboform already compatible
• YSlow

So off I went as that was the only reason I was holding off. Installed without problems and I love it. In just using it for a very short time (less than an hour):

1. Sites load fast. And memory usage is much improved (right now with a couple tabs open I'm looking at 70MB whereas before it was regularly several hundred megs).
2. Firefox itself loads very fast. Although some of this could be attributed to some add-ons that have been disabled now, it nevertheless is so much faster that even if the slug has not quite become a steed, it’s still awfully studly.
3. The new functionality in the location bar is great.
4. The add-ons dialogue is much improved. It's a small thing, but the reduced number of clicks to get an add-on installed makes a whole lot more sense than before.

And that's just what I've noticed right off the bat.

However, at first I thought Hit-a-Hint (a great add-on that makes it easy to do fast mouseless browsing) would be joining ColorZilla, Personal Menu, and a few others on the "not yet ready for 3" list, but searching the comments, sukhoy-isu mentions you can do a simple xpi installer change to get it going. Now how do you do that you may ask? Well, rather easily:

1. Get the hah_0_9_1.xpi installer from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1341, or rather, because the link is not available from within Firefox 3, go to http://hah.mozdev.org/installation.html.
2. The xpi file is a compressed archive, so use something like 7-zip to open it up and extract the install.rdf file.
3. Open the install.rdf file in your favorite text editor and modify the maxVersion value to 3.0 and save.
4. Plunk the install.rdf file back into the hah_0_9_1.xpi compressed archive.
5. Go to File -> Open File and locate your hah_0_9_1.xpi file and go through the resulting add-on installer process.
6. Voila! Start hitting your hints! 

Or, go the easy way and download the one I put together. Just change the extension from .zip to .xpi before opening it with Firefox.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Anything bad that ensues, don't blame me. It's not my fault. As always, it's Peter's.

UPDATE: installer updated to work with Firefox 3.1

I've always been a fan of Notepad2 as a replacement for Notepad. I spend a fair bit of time editing Inmagic Genie XML config files and the features like line numbers and XML syntax highlighting make this so much easier. However I've just switched to Notepad++ which allows multiple documents to be open in tabs. As I usually have at least 3 or 4 config files open at once, this in itself is a great time saver. Notepad++ also includes plug-ins for tools like HTML Tidy with an option to clean up the junk that Microsoft embeds when saving a Word doc to HTML. There is a file compare option - useful when reviewing Genie config files from a client to see what they have changed, plus there are a stack of other options that I haven't even looked at yet! Notepad++ is open source software and is available for download from Sourceforge.net. There is also a version available that runs from a USB stick at PortableApps.com.

Peter blogged awhile back on the Windows Live Messenger no-ad alternative Pidgin (no, I am NOT interested in singles available in Surrey). I've been using it ever since and really like it; and I LOVE no ads and the large number of plugins you can, ahem, plug in, to get greater functionality.

One of those plugins is the Guifications plugin that displays "toaster" popups in a user-defined corner of the screen - the lack of which was the one show stopper in my books. Here's how to get toasting with the Pidgin in Vista (and XP for that matter):

1. Go to http://plugins.guifications.org/trac/wiki/Guifications and download Guifications (I'm running 2.16 - there's v.3 in the works).
2. Install.
3. Go to your install's Tools -> Plugins.
4. Enable Guifications (while enabling a bunch of the other plugins you might like such as History, Offline Message Emulation, Text replacement, Windows Pidgin Options etc.
5. The default popups are ugly:
   
   so go to http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=676821&group_id=92888&func=browse and see what else is out there. Many are...ummm...lacking aesthetically... but two I found that are alright are the "Thin horizontal Aero-like theme" and a "Solid Vista Glass 3 Colors" one:
   
6. Download one or a couple of 'em. If you find some others that are okay, let me know in the comments.
7. Now locate your Pidgin guifications theme directory. Mine is located at C:\Users\tjardine\AppData\Roaming\.purple\guifications\themes.
8. Copy your downloaded files into this directory (unzipped, but contained in the parent folder):
   
9. Go back to Tools -> Plugins, select Guifications, and "Configure Plugin". Go to the the themes tab and select one of your new themes. And while you're there, go to the Notifications tab and uncheck some of the non-essential notification events before you're driven batty by the constant reminders of everybody going idle, coming back, going away, etc.

You can also change the entire theme of Pidgin, but I didn't find any that worked well or actually looked decent in Vista apart from the default one. If you're interested, there's some brief instructions on Lifehacker for this.