Originally Posted by fredtgreco

The latest version of Acrobat (not Reader) is very good and quick. Still takes up a lot of disk space (2GB), but in the days of cheap HDs, who cares?

Real Player is so bad that I have not even bothered to listen to .ram files for years. I refuse to ever have any version of Real Player on my system.

iTunes is typical Apple. Looks cute, is a huge hog, is nearly impossible to customize, cannot be backed up, does not work well with other programs, etc. If I did not like my iPod, I would never even look at an iTunes website. Ugh. If you really want to see how bad this is, go to Apple's own support forum and look at the "advice" that you are given as options for basic things like "back up my library" "transfer my library to a new external hard drive." You have a better chance of converting Iran than getting iTunes to play nice.

I haven't used IE for years either. Now with an IE tab view extension in FF, I never have to for anything, even MS sites.

Outlook is the one program that I can't live without. It works fine for me. I need it because I have so much productivity software that works with it - a great search engine (X1), GTD addin, Calendar print add in, addin for my phone PBx, etc. You need to customize and massage it - keeping your main PST file small (archiving) and compacting after deleting big emails, but it can run pretty smooth. There is also a tool (scanpst.exe) that helps to keep it on track.