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Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#272
post #142

* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…

I had 2 T41p laptops. They were great while they worked but they had a problem with the Nvidia chips which caused the chip to die at some point. You could reflow the board in the oven (did that twice) and it would give it a few more months of life but then would die again taking the laptop with it. Otherwise it was a great machine.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#273
post #61

Google Reader

I like Newsblur

I second this. I tried an awefull lot of feed readers when Google announced the end of Reader, and Newsblur is by far the most usable one, and it is actually pretty good. I would stay on Newsblur rather than returning to Google Reader would it come back to life.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#274

Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - somethi…

What a blast from the past. I loved PSP!

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#275
post #144

Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it. Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads. Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required. Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable. Most importantly old B…

> BSNL Tariffs They have the unlimited thing now right, where you can make calls at night and they're free? > Tap water Are you talking about India or the US?

> Are you talking about India or another country?

Fixed that for you.

I believe there are several other options besides the US.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#276

Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it. Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads. Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required. Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable. Most importantly old B…

I miss the search feature in Windows XP too. But Agent Ransack is a very good replacement and it even integrates with the file explorer. Try it!

Yes! Agent Ransack has become an indispensable tool in my daily work. With SSD and Agent Ransack i can do searches over ludicrous number of gigabytes within a heartbeat and usually find whatever it was. Yes, there are gnu tools for windows but from usability point of view Agent Ransack is way better (if we presume the tragick default cmd.exe as the command line, at least)

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#277
post #142

* IBM ThinkPad T41p/60. Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End…

Lenovo destroyed the Thinkpad legacy. I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad. I'd buy a retro Thinkpad,…

I'm desperately hanging on to my T500 daily work machine. It was the last generation with 16:10 screens and the second-to-last with the good keyboard layout.

With an SSD and maxed RAM it's still viable, but the C2D processor is a real bottleneck. Trouble is, any machine I could replace it with would be a processor upgrade and an everything else downgrade.

Edit: actually the Macbooks have great 16:10 screens, so there's at least that option. Unfortunately they come with a long list of downsides of their own.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#278

Softice

I constantly miss SoftICE. Rasta Ring 0 Debugger was looking like a promising replacement for a while, but it just seemed to fizzle out and never got where it should've been. WinDbg isn't awful these days, but that's about the most praise I can give it.

I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't exist anymore?

#279
post #221

Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton Commander. I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks. Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.

Far manager is great replacement for Norton commander and is free. Works in console, so ctrl+o works fine. Ctrl+f is also handy.
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