My old 40gb IBM Deskstar hard drive finally gave up the ghost on Sunday. It had been threatening to do so for a while now – even a low-level format earlier this year failed to map out the bad bits that caused it to make the kind of noises hard drives shouldn’t. I can’t say I’m all that bothered by its loss, it was slow, had a small capacity by today’s standards and it ran like a boiler (so much so, I could afford to keep my radiator turned off).

So, being the prepared kind of guy I am (more about preparation in later posting), I had the replacement hard drive arrive on the Friday before the Sunday. I’m sure there’s some prophecy to take into account here, but no, for real, I knew it was going to happen so the new drive was all ready to be installed. It’s a nice 250gb Maxtor Diamondmax 10 with 16MB cache – boy is it fast. Considering most drives have 2mb or 8mb caches, this drive should fly. And it’s really quiet too.

Anyway, the purpose of this post was to mention an RSS feed reader for Outlook: I’ve moved away from TheBat, largely for performance problems, and also because I’ve got way too much e-mail to manage so I figured a clean start in a new e-mail client would help. And I can synchronise Outlook’s schedule with my PocketPC, which is good – I need to get even more organised.

The RSS reader is intraVnews. It integrates with Outlook, so any blogs or RSS feeds that you read regularly appear in the same format as Outlook’s e-mails. First impressions are very favourable. Previously I used RSS Reader, then RSS Bandit, then Omea – none of which “floated my boat”. Omea suffered from performance issues. RSS Reader was a bit of a memory hog. RSS Bandit was fine, and I’ll be revisiting it soon. If I choose to stick with intraVnews I’ll write a fuller commentary here.