a dual monitor to make my work easier thanks to Nvidia Geforce's linux driver support for its graphics cards.
    * View .chm files with ChmSee HTML help viewer.
    * Make a synchronized backup with Grsync. By 'synchronized' I mean not only updating newer files on the target media, but deleting older files on the target media which no longer exist on the source media. Maybe Windows has something like this too, but I've never ran into it.
    * Use Zim to keep tract of my notes and articles I want to refer to frequently. Zim aims at bringing the concept of a wiki to the desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically.
    * Do a CPU benchmark with HardInfo. It has a network database updater to download the latest benchmark information from the Internet. I try to keep my hardware updated to be at least half of current top CPU performance.