Upgrading our family PC’s

I’ve written in the past about Recommendations for a Clean PC (2008) and What I installed on my home Windows 7 PC (2009.) However, there is some fabulous new software available so below are my latest recommendations:

Windows 7 – The best balance of stability, speed, and usability. My favorite feature is the <win> + <arrow> that moves a window to the left or right.
Office 2010 (free trial) – I LOVE the way that Outlook merges all emails in a conversation regardless of
Windows Live Essentials (free) – Messenger Social is a great way to keep-up with you friends on a variety of social networks including Facebook and MySpace. Windows Live Sync is a great upgrade for Live Mesh supporting sync’ing files between PC’s, to my SkyDrive, and allowing remote access.
IE (free with Win7), Flock (free) – These are my two favorite browsers. I use IE for productivity but I also like Flock for social browsing with it’s “People pane.” I have various accounts on various services and I’ve found the easiest way to manage these is to have a different browser for each account. My personal favorites are IE and Flock, but they all install rather quickly and it makes knowing what is signed-in as RobDolin vs. TessPhotos is very helpful.
TweetDeck (free) – If I’m at a conference and want to follow a few threads of conversation at once, this multi-column social media monitor is a great tool.

Being an amateur web developer, I also have a few tools I recommend:

Expression Web 4 (free trial) – This is my tool of choice for editing HTML as well as viewing XML. It’s quick, convenient, and has great visual editing and preview features
Visual Web Dev 2010 (free) – This is my favorite tool for editing ASP.net / C# files. Intellisense makes it massively easy to remember function or method names and to not typo variable names.
Fiddler (free) – Kudos to Eric Lawrence for this excellent HTTP traffic watching tool.

Thanks very much for reading. I hope you find all of the recommendations to be useful for you. Take care–
–Rob Dolin