I know, ’tis the season. But you might not yet have enough of the top 10 pieces, so here is my own quirky take on things for Search Enterprise Desktop over at Techtarget.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been attempting not to store anything on my own hard drive, to try to test out the cloud services of several providers for document storage and collaboration. It has been a mixed bag, to say the least.

Cloud services store files on their servers so you don’t need to worry about backups or available computers. They can be as simple as a file repository to more sophisticate things that create entire networks of virtual computers for applications and databases.

Every cloud provider has lots of fine print that mean you have to kick the tires pretty carefully before you can understand what is offered and what isn’t.

The three providers that I tried were Microsoft’s Live Office, Google Docs, and Box.net. The first two are free. Box has free accounts, but you probably want to make use of one of their paid ones that start at $15 per month. All three have been busy adding features to their services over the past several months, and that is the first thing that you notice about cloud computing: things change, and sometimes on a daily basis. So evaluating these moving targets means a lot more work than just installing some DVD on your PC. You have to periodically return and see what has been added.

Microsoft Live has made the most improvements over the past year, but it still is a hodgepodge of services that have knit together its Hotmail email hosting, Skydrive backup service, and hosted Office Live services. Of the three, they have the best solution if you want to upload PowerPoint slide decks and be able to quickly make adjustments to either the slides themselves or the speaker notes that are shown underneath each slide. Google Docs ignores the notes, which for me is an issue because I use them as prompts for my speeches. Box will let you edit the notes and the slide data, but only after opening your slide deck with Zoho, a hosted open office solution. It isn’t all that much trouble, but certainly not as easy as Microsoft’s Live Office.

Each service has varying limitations on the maximum file size they will allow you to upload and your overall storage allotment. Box has a limit of 2GB per file for its paid accounts and 25 MB for free ones. Skydrive allows up to 50 MB per file. Google 1 GB per file sometimes. I say sometimes because of the way they calculate the overall storage quota. If you convert any MS Office files into their own formats, these files don’t count towards your storage allotment. Microsoft’s Live Office gives you 25 GB of free storage as part of its Skydrive service. Box free accounts give you 5 GB, and the paid accounts can up that to 500 GB or unlimited if you shell out more dough for the enterprise version.

The other part of using cloud services is it makes sharing and collaborating with your documents easier than having to send email attachments around and getting bogged down in resolving different versions. The goal here is to use email for the notification portion, but not for the actual transport of the documents. All three make it easy to send a link to your file to your collaborators. Goggle has made the most improvements here and there are some interesting near-real time editing features that they have added into their Docs platform. The only catch is that all of your collaborators have to have a Google account. Microsoft and Box can send links that anyone can open to view and edit all of the files in a particular folder without requiring them to sign up for their services.

Microsoft and Box both have some interesting tie-ins with social networking apps that can post notifications to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status feeds so your followers and friends can see what files you are working on.

So how successful have I been with sticking in the cloud? Certainly, old habits die hard, and to resist the temptation to save my files locally is tough. I wish we could have one cloud provider that combined the best of the three services.

I know many of you are planning your 5 am commando raids this coming Friday on the local shopping emporia, but if you need a break from trying to download all the various holiday flyers so carefully preserved in PDF format by Walmart, Best Buy et al. or trying out Black Friday apps on your iPhone, you might want to take a moment to clean up your Windows PC with the latest 2011 version of TuneUp Utilities. It will be well worth your time, and for $50 for three computers, cheap too.

All of us who use the same computer for more than a year have noticed that things tend to slow down over time: it takes longer for the PC to boot up and shut down. Even when we try to restrain ourselves from adding or deleting programs, the registry gets bogged down with superfluous entries that slow the machine down while it is running too. That is where TuneUp can help.

I have used previous versions, and while they were good about optimizing the overall Windows OS parameters, they didn’t do much in the way of figuring out the applications on my machines. The new version goes deeper into how the apps work, and makes it really easy to adjust them to meet your particular needs. You get constant feedback about the consequences of your decisions, so you immediately know whether something that you just did is going to actually improve your performance or not have any impact. I wish we had something like this for our lives.

One of the new features in the product is called Program Deactivator. If you wanted your PC to run faster, you previously had to uninstall programs that took up a lot of your system’s resources. Now, with just one click, you can deactivate a software program that you don’t normally use. However, the bits remain installed on your computer, and when you need to run the program, you just click on its icon or select it from your Programs menu and it comes right back up with almost no lag time.

By deactivating unused or infrequently used programs, you speed up your overall operations. TuneUp shows you the impact of your selection on startup, during operation and upon shut down, so you can get an idea of what kind of resource hog each program is.

TuneUp engineers did some benchmarks that showed deactivating programs returned a sluggish PC almost back to its first day performance characteristics. The process is very intuitive and takes just a few minutes.

There are a lot of other performance enhancements in the utility, including a special “turbo mode” that can make your machine run a lot faster when you need it for playing games, editing videos or doing other processor-intensive tasks.

TuneUp Utilities works for all versions of Windows since XP with SP2, including 64-bit versions. You can download a free trial here.

And if you want to see a quick video screencast that I did for the company, check it out here.

Twitter continues to be a great way to notify your adoring public, to provide customer service, to connect you with your potential customers, and to keep up to date on your competitors. And while you may not have completely gotten the Twitter ethos, you might be interested in one or more of these third-party tools that I have tried over the past several months. Feel free to share your own favorites. Please note: there is no guarantee that any of these companies will last longer than your average Tweet these days, so the links might be stale by the time you read this.

First are a variety of scheduling tools so you don’t have to be tweeting in the middle of the night or during dinner, as appealing as that might be for some of you. Studies have shown that most tweets aren’t read because they scroll off the feed in a jumble of posts. So it might be better to schedule them for the off-hours when the density is lower. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are two such tools.

Stat, search and research apps. TweetStats will graphically show you when you have Tweeted. Tweetmeme and Wefollow can be used to follow trends and keep track of what is popular at any given point in time. Twittervision can be used to find people in your local geographic area who are active with Twitter. Tools to follow people in a specific industry, or share lists of Twitter users, include Listorious, MuckRack (list of journalists) and Tweepml. Two real time search sites are SocialMention.com, which searches over several dozen sites, and 48ers.com, which will search across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Google’s Buzz.

Multiple account posting apps. If you have more than one Twitter account, or want to coordinate Tweets with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress blog accounts, then take a look at Pixelpipe.com, Ping.fm, or Posterous.com. Each offers ways to send forth your wisdom with a single click. Just make sure you check the post before you distribute widely. Dlvr.it can post your blog and other RSS feeds to nearly a dozen different sites too.