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No discussion of the FUP list is complete without a mention that you can disable it. Right click a vacant area in the start menu and select Properties. Under the Start menu tab, click Customize. Set the Number of recent programs to display to zero. Now you have more room to pin 10 more items that you really want.

Springpad is a well-regarded competitor to Evernote. The functionality of the two products is fairly similar, with each product having areas of strength.

Springpad is committed to remaining free to use, and I’ve found the ways it generates revenue to be clever and unobtrusive.

I’ve switched entirely to Springpad because I’d have to pay for 4 premium accounts to give my family full capabilities in Evernote, and I find $180 a year to be excessive for non-business use.

First, my hi-res originals always stay local, stored on multiple NAS and DVD. I don’t want to lose my photos.

After that, I do all sharing using Picasa Web Albums. If you get a Google+ account, Google will allow you to store unlimited images on Picasa as long as the long side of the image is 2048 pixels or less. On most images this is the equivalent of 3MB resolution and is plenty for someone to download and print up to a 3×5 or 4×6 snapshot if they want hardcopy, and certainly more than enough for a full screen display on a high resolution monitor.

I run my photos through FastStone Photo Resizer, which I keep permanently set to output at 2048. Then I drag and drop the resized copies into Picasa Web, name the new album and select a cover photo. It’s as close to effortless as it comes.

Picasa is as flexible as any other service as far as organization and has a very robust download capability, a mandatory item in my checklist. Google’s philosophy of “it’s your data” is very apparent in Picasa, something that sets it apart from virtually all of the other commercial solutions.

And Picasa is not constantly beating you to buy something, so you can get on with what you’re trying to do. That’s worth a lot in my book.

Picasa is Google’s strategic solution for including photos across all of its products, especially its new reach into social, just as YouTube is strategic for videos, so Picasa is going to be around for the long term. And while no cloud solution should be trusted 100%, Google currently has the most robust cloud in existence.

2 days after Google I/O ended, it’s worthwhile mentioning that cloud computing does not necessarily equal Chromebook computing or Google apps. I routinely use my Chromebook to log into my company’s web-based infrastructure and perform all of my managerial tasks. Like many technologically-aware companies, everything from finance to problem management to project planning is web-based, but all of our data is resident in servers behind our corporate firewall and is replicated in corporate data centers across the country.

If you’re not using the “typical” option, you’ll have problems like this. Completely uninstall and reinstall “typical”. You can still pick an alternate directory to install into even if you use “typical”.

Also, are you logging into multiple domains (i.e. a mobile user)? I’ve had to reinstall Palm software at each domain I’ve logged into. The Palm developers just don’t understand Windows 2000 very well yet.