Inspired by Ruhi’s post on What’s in my Laptop… I’ve decided to come up with my own “What’s in my Box” post… sharing all the apps & things that I have on my PC.

Background Info
I got my first PC in 1998. It had a 330MHz Intel Celeron, 32MB SD-RAM, 3.2GB HD, CDROM Drive, 56K modem & Windows 98 with a 15” CRT.
But I first started computing on a Win 95 PC… Actually I’ve used almost all Windows OSes (3.1, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP & Vista), some Linuxes but no OS X.

Used the old PC for 6 years, before I got a new one in 2004:
- Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 3.06GHz HT (MMX, SSE, SSE2, 512KB L2)
- Gigabyte GA-PE800L Motherboard (533 MHz FSB)
- 512MB DDR (133 MHz)
- 80GB SAMSUNG HD (IDE) - 13.4GB Free Space
- 128 MB GeForce FX 5200 (AGP 4x)
- BenQ Combo
- 17’’ [NAMELESS] CRT
Updates: UPS 600VA, 250GB Hitachi HD, LG DVD-RW Burner & 1.2GB DDR (one of the 256MB broke down & I added a 1GB).

Unlike with my first PC, I had fewer problems with this one, but there’s this one problem that nags me… Had it for 2 years now - I cannot run a process/application that consumes 50+ % CPU usage for more than 5 mins. If the CPU temp goes beyond 82 C, the computer restarts. & because of that I can’t do many things - like rip a dvd, make a continuous Spybot Scan (have to pause it every 5 min) – in short, everything that requires heavy processing. I can’t even run Safe Mode since it uses CPU… (Task Manager shows 0% CPU usage but I can hear the fan whirring & it restarts after 5 min).

I hope to use this one for at least 8 years before getting a new one… (or before it becomes totally obsolete). 5 years from now on… I can’t predict what new technologies will surface… so it may have 8 cores, 128-bit, Windows Mars Edition, etc…

My other “supercomputer”
That’s my good old Nokia 7610 smartphone:
- 123 MHz ARM
- 7MB Memory
- 8MB Internal memory
- Symbian S60 v2 OS v7.0
- 1MP Camera
- Bluetooth 1.1
- GPRS Class 6
- 256MB RS-MMC
Got it as a gift in 2005. I’m quite satisfied with it as I’ve got over 85 apps installed… though I’m running out of apps as all developers are switching to Symbian S60 3rd Edition. Hope to use it for another 5 years… :P

The Software in the Box
CD/DVD Burning:
- Nero 8 Lite Edition
- Alcohol 120% (for ripping & virtual drives)

Media Players:
- WMP11 (My fav)
- VLC (quick viewing)
- iTunes (I only installed this because of Quicktime)

Customization:
- WindowsBlinds 6 (Vista-skin!!!)
- Styler Toolbar
- RocketDock
- IconPackager
- Windows Sidebar Styler

Photo Editing:
- Adobe Photoshop CS3
- Corel PSP Photo X2
- Picasa 2

Audio/Video Editing:
- Gordion Knot
- Nero WaveEditor
- Total Video Converter
- Subtitle Workshop
- DVD Shrink

Education:
- Microsoft Maths
- Maple 11
- Matlab
- AutoCAD 2008
- Equation Wizard
- Mathematica
- Graphmatica
- AutoGraph
- Visual C++ 9.0 2008

Security:
- Kaspersky Internet Security 7
- Windows Defender
- Spybot – Search & Destroy
- Lavasoft AdWare SE

Tools:
Recovery - Recuva, BadCopy Pro & PC Inspector File Recovery
- CC Cleaner
- Driver Magician (Backup your drivers)
- WinRAR
- ABBY FineReader 8.0 (OCR)
- Universal Extractor (extract ANYTHING!)
- Flashget & IDM (Download Managers)

Blogging:
All text is written using Word 07 SP1… but there’s Windows Live Writer as well.
My favourite browser is Opera but I use Firefox 2 most of the time with the following extensions:
- Flashgot
- Greasemonkey (Unembed)
- User Agent Switcher (Google BOT!!!)
- AdBlock Plus
- DownloadHelper
- Fast Video Download
- FireFTP
- Flashblock
- Google Toolbar
- No Script

& I would like to single out the CoComment extension for Firefox (thanks to Ruhi) which is a must for all bloggers… It allows you to track comments you make on other blogs! There are so many blogs around that I always forget on which blog I comment - but CoComment does the comment tracking perfectly. You need to sign-up at CoComment before installing the Firefox extension.