I recently read a post over on the Printmode printing industry blog about the computer tools Adam uses on a daily basis. So, here goes my attempt to share the same information.
My main computer for the past year or so has been an IBM ThinkPad Z60t running Windows XP Pro (SP2). The extra screen real estate I get with the wide screen is nice. Overall, it has been a great machine for what I do, and I really like the finger print scanner (vs. typing passwords).
As far as software tools, the list could get pretty long so I will try to focus on the highlights. To manage my email I use Outlook, but with an awesome plug-in called Agendus. Not only does Agendus add functionality I really need from a sales perspective, but it also synchronizes perfectly with my Treo650 cell phone.
I always seem to have a Firefox window open (I will use IE7 when forced by the web-site I might be visiting). As a company we use a CRM system called Sugar, that I have running on a Fedora Linux box, and we all access via a web-browser. Both Fedora and Sugar are open source, so the price is right.
For documents I still use MS Word, and I also make frequent use of PowerPoint for sales presentations. For straight up text editing I have I have gone back to Notepad mostly because I can’t seem to find the cool little text editor I had on my old machine.
For ssh terminal access to Linux boxes I use Putty, and for sftp access to said same boxes I use CoreFTP.
Finally, I installed Google Desktop, and let it index my whole hard drive…there is no faster way to search for anything on your computer. I guess Microsoft has improved search in Vista, but I have not plans to go there anytime soon.
Who’s next?