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There used to be a time when, if you were driving on a motorway or dual carriageway, you looked in your rear view mirror and you would see, approaching rapidly, very rapidly, a Bedford Astramax van. You would be safe to make at least one of the following assumptions about this van.

• It would be white.
• It would be dirty.
• Someone would have written, with cutting and incisive wit, in the dirt on the back of the van with their finger “also available in white“, “clean me” or possibly “I wish my Missus was as dirty as this van“.
• It would have its headlights on whatever the hour of the day or night.
• It would be trying to overtake you, regardless of the car you were driving and what speed you were currently doing.

I’m not the first person to comment on the fact that the Astramax was in fact the world’s fastest production vehicle.

You don’t see that many Astramax’s on the road these days and even less of them in your rear view mirror. This is because they have been forced into near extinction by their successor; the British Gas van.

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When I’m working on a Windows machine I like to keep Task Manager running minimised in my task bar so I’ve got immediate visual feedback on how hard my system’s working. That way, when I think my system’s not running as fast as it should be I can immediately see if the system’s maxed out at 100% CPU usage.

When this happens, which is a fairly common occurence, Task Manager’s Processes tab will normally point a finger at the culprit process, which is all well and good if I see a process like firefox.exe soaking up all the resources it can but if the process name isn’t as intuitive how can you tell if this process needs to be killed or restarted?

Whilst a Google search is always worthwhile, a combination of What Process? and Greatis’ Startup Programs Database have proved indispensible in the past. Whilst What Process? can be as apocryphal as the Wikipedia the combination of the two sites have yet to fail me.

As a nice side effect, checking all of your running processes against the Startup Programs Database can dramatically increase the startup speed of your Windows machine. For example, if you’ve got a version of Java installed, then you’ve probably got a copy of jusched.exe running to check for updates; if you’d prefer to check manually then this process can be prevented from starting at boot time without any problem.

A lot of blogs have lists of essential things and sheep like, I’ve done the same for my take on apps, one list for the Mac and another for Windows.

Which is all fine and good.

But it’s nice when you see a different take on this sort of list genre and these two lists caught my eye and attention today:

The wonderfully named 43folders has a take on apps to reduce your daily distraction on a Mac although some of the comments are a bit severe including one poster who suggested modifying your system so you could only surf certain web sites during your working day. Surely the whole point is it’s your computer and besides, whatever happened to self control?

On a slightly different note Heading East lists 10 Mac apps which you shouldn’t be without and which aren’t common sights on people’s top 10 lists. While there’s a few Safari plugins, which aren’t too much use to me as I use Firefox as my browser of choice, and a mention of Flip4Mac which I’ve included in my list, there’s a couple of gems I’d not heard of such as Applejack and Witch, which especially appeals to the keyboard jockey which lurks deep inside.

I’ve already written about my choice of essential apps on the Mac and so, in the spirit of cross platform-ness, I thought I’d do the same for Windows. It’s proved a bit of an education. With one exception; the list of apps seems to fall into two distinct categories.

Firstly, there’s those apps which are available on both Mac and Windows, so there’s no surprise that both Firefox and iTunes make an appearance.

Secondly though, the remaining apps seem to be provide features which I’m used to on the Mac or on UNIX in general but which are missing from a stock Windows install.

It’s probably due to my too many years of UNIX experience that I seem to automatically install apps which make Windows more UNIX like or maybe it’s making Windows less Windows like?

Cygwin

Imagine UNIX on your Windows machine. You’ve just imagined Cygwin. There’s a Bash shell of course, with all your favourite shell tools; less, sed, awk, grep and all the rest. But there’s also a full POSIX subsystem to link your apps against and there’s more. There’s a full X Window system; you can even run KDE under Cygwin under Windows and there’s more. There’s all of your Windows drives, both physical and network, mounted under /cygdrive and there’s more. There’s full UNC path support and there’s more. You can even have all of your domain or Active Directory permissions in your Bash shell. What’s there not to like?

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My desk(s) at home, in the office. Actually, we’re being polite here and we call it the office so as not to offend it; actually it’s one side of the loft room - hence the 45 degree angle of the ceilings in some of the photos.

And so, in a clockwise direction we have an Apple eMac, with 512 Mb of memory and running OS X Panther.

To be honest this isn’t ours, it belongs to a friend and I’m in the process of upgrading it to run OS X Tiger.

To be really honest I haven’t actually started upgrading it yet but I will real soon now. Promise.

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