I agree here completely. I'm not a programmer, but I'm in a high level Windows/UNIX engineering group doing systems design mostly. At 39 I'm the youngest in my group of seven engineers. The caveat is we are all very experienced in the field, which is why we are in the high level group to start with. Our more entry level positions are populated mostly - not all - by those in their late 20's and very early 30's.

Honestly my wife's XP box gets rebooted maybe 3-4 times a year. Otherwise it's just in powersave mode. Takes about 5 seconds to wake it up.

If you want something quick and dirty that is available on every Windows (and DOS if you still have any of those) box, learn how to use edlin. It's a console line editor that I use at least a couple times a week for quickly editing host files and simple stuff like that. No point in opening a full editor for something that will take me less than 10 seconds in edlin.

TextWrangler!

I've been using Boxer (Windows only) since the mid-90's. Back then it was a DOS and OS/2 console application and was the fastest editor around for those platforms. Today it is still as nimble and useful as ever and I've happily paid for my last six upgrades since I always make that money back several times over! No connection to the product other than being a long time user.