Here you can look over some of the things that I have discovered to help streamline and pull the most useability out of my PC's / Servers. Note though, My primary machines are XP & Win Server2003 based, with some older seldom machines running Win98. the media player of choice is Win Media Player 10 & VLC. I don't plan on upgrading to Vista at all. It is a fubared and difficult OS to get under control removing the end users ability to do truely secure it... I know what MS likes to do behind the scenes and the leave their OS open to whomever they are laying in bed with..
General File Storage: Keep your folders & Files Organized. 1st Set a limit on the amount of files in any particular folder, I generally limit to about 200 for pictures, Music that isn't part of an album, is iin a general folder about 700mb to 1gb. Why? the OS depending, on disc capacity and amount used and preferences [like thumbnails and etc] Can take a while to read a folder, So keeping things organized keeps things speedy. As your collection of whatever grows, don't be a slave to keeping sub folders in its main folder.
Media Player Auto Lists: I'm obsessive about clean titles and tags. If your a heavy downloader, make a Auto Play List for Music Video and pictures added in the Last 24 hours. This can help you get to those files quickly to tidy em' up, especially on a family network.
Create Auto Lists based on 'File Name'. For Instance I have K:\Video\Stargate SG1\S1 and so on. Using a Play list based on File name means I won't have to add genre tags with SG1 [which by the way would only work in My local Media Player] My Media Player playlists are used by every computer in the house, So when a user opens that list it adds everything in the Stargate folder, Because the file name behind the scenes includes that folder reference. After that it can be up to the User of that PC to add genre tags if desired.. however Your Media Player can stay tidy!
Manage the Doctrine! Much like your business network, there should be a folder for just about everything. If you allow your home network to become a free for all, you'll spend hours cleaning up after everyone else & and you'll have duplicates [dups] all over the place. Let everyone know what your plan is, especially if your using one PC on 24/7 as the main storage unit or a NAS USB/LAN Drive.
Downloading: Peer to Peer is the sweetest thing to ever happen since the first wheel. But like most things humans use, People get lazy, Falsify File names to get people to download from them or share bogus files that's been corrupted by a certain group of centralized server owners to track DL's [Ya don't think they pull those stats out of their ass do you?]
First Check your intended file by its hash number [there are several different methods but hashing basically generates a files Fingerprint] And Or Look through sites that host hash numbers to find the file you want. Use that Number to search for your media.
Set a your client to include Favorite folders to Download into its destination folder & clean up the File name to remove un-needed & goofy info [Many people are slaves to Old Conventions of File naming to include the encoders Handle and other extra info.
[Keep In Mind that everything about a file equals real estate used on your hard drive, Name Files Smartly and use properly named folders to help cut down info used in File names].
Programs
When I used to work on PC's for folks I was usually appalled by the amount of completely useless & repetitive Junk on their PC's, either from downloading or Hardware install discs. Yes some of that software is useless AND in some cases vendors use the op to install Spyware like Wild Tangent [HP/Compaq].
While Your installin that piece of hardware, plug it in first.. Windows may ALREADY have the driver for it in itself! especially if its something you've already had and say you've upgraded windows.
Know your software & Standardize! Why buy a Greeting Card application when with MS Office/ Publisher & Photoshop you can bang out a near Hallmark quality card :-S
For instance, My bag is Video; everything should be able to pack a movie I say. Some would buy a special app for their PDA's called Kinoma. It's okay, but I use DivX for my home movies... I would have to use 2 different apps & spend close to 100 bills to satisfy that desire if I used 2 separate apps... which would be sick considering DivX has a great mobile converter also! I spend [well] 29 bills for DivX, a free app on the PDA [which played on a Palm Zire31] and Slam I have video to go [the real boon is that the mobile video is watchable on a TV/DVD player with SD.. it akin to watching VHS,, but hey share the Love hunny!]
I have a fairly simple philosophy about my techno environment... keep your basic Important info in a format that is easily accessible with standard formats i.e. txt csv jpg pdf etc. it comes in handy when your accessing forgotten info from a few years back.. Saving info or formats from some software for permanent acchive is risky.... You may not have that application in 5 years!
PDA Palms
Much like my PC'sI try and stick to apps that perform. I've only paid for a few apps Handmark/Catalina's PocketMoney, MobileDB & Addition4Palm [Addition is now longer in dev]
PocketMoney will import/export to MS Money or Quikbooks
MobileDB will do simple lists and with the basic PC app, import export CSV files [Version for Access is also available]
Addition4Palm is an excel type spreadsheet it will also perform formula's it does have a plugin for Excel.
Pocketunes Is one of the better apps for Audio.
ICQ nice clean app for comm there are also some other IM's
Palm Backup utility. Shareware, but I have yet to find the payment amount. The shareware version doesn't allow scheduled backups... but who needs scheduled back ups when ya back up every few days. It will back up to RAM or SD card CardBkup.zip
Video/Audio TCPMP is a great mp4 [avi] Video player and it also handles a multitude of Audio and it allows boosting of those files with weaker audio. TCPMP.zip
FastSync & FastSyncRemote
