What I Use

Computers

My workhorse rig is my HP Elitebook 8440p. I use it primarily for work. Inside houses a Core i5 CPU with 8GB of RAM. It has plenty of horsepower for day to day work.

I also have a Dell Studio Desktop 540 with a quad Core 2 Duo and 8 GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon graphics card. This computer is used mainly for gaming and media creation.

For a home server, I re-purpose an old Dell OptiPlex workstation. It actually hosts several virtual machines. One virtual machine is used as the primary file server.

I have a couple of old computers like an old Mac Mini and a Dell laptop, but they are mostly idle and gathering dust.

Mobile Devices

My main phone is my iPhone 4S. I use it for everything from checking emails to listening to music. Also I make phone calls on it if you did not know that already.

I also own a first generation iPad which is a good device for media watching and gaming. I especially like the instant on feature if you need to look things up fairly quickly. No need to boot up a PC anymore. I use it primary for web surfing and reading on the Kindle app.

Update: I now own a Kindle Fire which replaced my iPad. It is still not the best pure reading experience on a device but it can do more things. It has features comparable to the iPad. Plus it is also very portable and easy to take around.

Speaking of Kindle, I do have a Kindle 2 but it has been demoted as a secondary reading device. It is still the best experience when reading outdoor.

Software and Services

My main operating system is Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise. Windows XP has been relegated to operate some virtual machines. VMWare Workstation and Server are the virtualization software I use. The home server runs on Windows Server 2003 Standard. As a developer, my main tool of choice is Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.There are other tools I use such as TextPad,
Beyond Compare, XML Spy, and PSPad. Of course, I use Office 2010 for day to day business.

With the advent of cloud computing, there are numerous services I utilized. For backup, I use Carbonite for which I highly recommend. With most our content becoming digital, you need a way to back them up to the cloud if you plan on keeping them safe. I heard so many horror stories of people losing their photos and video from hardware failures to malware and viruses. Other services I use are Amazon Cloud Player to store my music collection and Yahoo’s Flickr to store my photos. Another service I am recently using is Spotify which is a wonderful music streaming service.

Social media is so popular that it is hard to avoid it. As a result, I do have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. I use each for different purposes.