Your Chess Software?

 I've recently started using Chess Mentor as well. It has pretty much replaced all of my chess books for the time being. As to laptop real estate, I bought a 1 terabyte external hard drive--it was unbelievably cheap to someone, like myself, who remembers what a 5 megabyte hard used to cost in the early 1980s--and I keep all of my chess software iso images* (excepting Chessmaster10, which I want available at all times), chess movies, six piece end game tables and all of that crap on it. 

* I almost always rip CD and DVD based software to iso images and mount them as virtual drives so the software will run faster without having to constantly read from the comparatively slow DVD drive. 

 Slightly off topic, but what application do you use to create the ISO images?

Under WinXP and GNU/Linux: DVD Shrink and, if necessary, DVD Decrypter.

 Will this software work with CD based applications?

 Yes. For instance, when I play Chessmaster 10 (of Fritz 10 for that matter) I mount the number 2 & 3 CD iso images on virtual drives. That way I have all of the audio files and tutorials etc... and the programs don't keep asking me to insert a CD.

Of course, you wouldn't need to shrink a CD. Then again, I suppose you wouldn't need to shrink a DVD unless you were going to burn it to a 4.7 gb single layer DVD+R.

I use Chessbase 9 with megabase 2007 and keep the database updated weekly with new Games from This week in chess I paste them to my reference Database. Also for training  I bought Chessbase Training DVDs to use in chessbase chess media.

Chess Engines I have quite a lot off different chess engines alot off free ones

And I Bought latest Shredder 10, Junior 10, Fritz 10, Fruit, Rybka Latest and Chessmaster 10. My Favourite is Rykba Because off its style off play and also the strongest chess engine for the Pc. But Fritz 10 I like for analysing my games

I use Fritz 10 interface but Rykba engine for analyseing my games to see why I lost my Games and to see what I missed in the Game

Also use 6 piece Tablebases for my Endgame study.

My only Problem is getting time to study at chess.

What stops me is playing chess with friends instead off getting down to studing my chess development and understanding why moves are played.

I also have Quite alot off Chess ebooks in Pdf and other formats well over a 100 on Dvd.

Again Same old problem there is not enough Time in a day  to read them for playing Chess with friends.

Then I wonder why I seem to never improve in my chess games.

I bet this happens to a lot off people.  Why can I never seem to find the time to study at chess.

But then there are only 24 hours in a day and only 168 hours in a week. and if we sleep 8 hours a day or 56 hours a week it only leaves me 108 hours in a week for chess not long is it with all the other things we have to do.

My chess software??

My brain.

I can't wait to get my hands on this thing.

I've started using a program called Chess Eye in order to improve my chess visualization skills. 

Chessbase 9 wth Megabase 2007, Rybka multi-processor, Fritz, and 6-man tablebases on my desktop, Chesspad with Crafty on my laptops.

FYI: Anyone who doesn't want to pay for chess software, Toga II is a really strong chess engine. In Blitz 4' + 2"/move tournaments that I've run, it trounces Fritz 10 and often ties Rybka. (it uses Scorpio bit bases, which can be downloaded at the same site and are a lot smaller than Nalimov tables.

 http://www.superchessengine.com/toga_ii.htm

Toga II is a really strong chess engine.

Absolutely! Toga is a top-ten engine and free.  :)

it trounces Fritz 10 and often ties Rybka.

In the CCRL tests here's how Toga fared:

   Toga vs Rybka (2cpu) - 0 wins, 20 losses, 16 draws

   Toga vs Free Rybka - 10 wins, 11 losses, 16 draws

   Toga vs Fritz 10 -  18 wins, 17 losses, 16 draws

   Toga vs Fritz 9 - 28 wins, 7 losses, 14 draws

Yup. That's an excellent score for a free engine or any engine! The CCRL folks usually test an engine using 2 CPUs if and only if the engine can take advantage of them. It takes extra programming to make a chess engine capable of using 2 CPUs effectively.

I know. I was alluding to the table which seems to indicate that all but one of the engines that came in ahead of Toga II were running on dual cpu and/or 64bit machines.