Friday, January 21, 2011

List: 'Top 10 downloads for 2010'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. At the end of my ‘List Friday’ post two weeks ago, I promised – Scout’s honour – that I wouldn’t subject you to any more ‘best of 2010’ lists [1]. I’m a man of my word. Usually. Who said that promises were made to be broken? Maybe it was me. Anyway, computers are still on my mind. So please forgive me. For today’s list, courtesy of cnet.com is ‘Top 10 Windows downloads of 2010’ [2] It’s a countdown list – from 10 to 1. The most interesting thing about this list is that half the items on it – numbers 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 to be precise – are security programs. So self-evidently Windows users are concerned, if not preoccupied, about computer security. Contrast this list with its cnet sister (or brother, I don’t care) list: ‘Top 10 Mac downloads of 2010’ [3]. On this list none – that’s right, zero – of the items are security programs. Ho hum.

P.S. Talking of computer programs, my new computer came without a program that should’ve been pre-installed on it. I’ve downloaded it, but I can’t install it because it needs to go onto a specific hard drive partition which currently is too small. So a courier’s taking the computer to Launceston. Almost certainly the hard drive will need to be formatted and Windows re-installed. So when I get it back, whenever that may be, I’ll have to download, install and configure my programs from scratch. Ho hum again.

2 comments:

Chris Burrows said...

Infuriating about your computer, I hope it does not take too long to be returned.

Paul said...

Software like Partition Magic or Partition Expert or probably a bunch of others should be able to resize th partitions easily without needing a reformat.

Whether they bother, or whether they nuke and start again, is a different question.