Miscellaneous tools
Various neat little programmes. If you need a CD/DVD burner, try CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn instead of buying a copy of Nero. 7zip is an archiver/decompressor and an excellent replacement for WinZip or WinRAR. If you find yourself losing track of where you're saving your files, maybe Copernic Desktop Search or Google Desktop will be useful. Areca Backup is a tool that lets you synchronise the files on your hard drive, and those saved on your USB key or an external disk – now you won't lose track of different versions of your thesis! A short aside on backup – a 500GB external drive costs only about £50 these days. You can dump your entire laptop on it, and this is by far the most convenient way of backing up your precious data. With Areca Backup, an external drive, and a good backup schedule, your life will be so much easier if your laptop decides to die when you're in your third year (as it's already happened to me). You can even schedule Areca to run automatically in XP: see support.microsoft.com/kb/308569.