I may be rubbish at the hard stuff but I reckon I'm an ace at sifting thorugh the early stages. I'm even more abstemious that Little Bird in what I write in, limiting myself to pairs or triples
in a line in a box. So I won't write a pair down if they aren't in the same row or column. That way you can trap those locked rows and columns that are so difficult to spot once you start littering the field with candidates (as you surely must at a certain point).
I found the little device described on this thread as a real boon when it comes to a speedy populating of lines in a box:
http://www.sudoku.org.uk/discus/messages/2/146.html?1124446262and if you're lucky you may even find you've solved some new cells ahead of time.
And I'm with george-no1 on the x-wing stuff - it'll transform the amount of fun you can extract and the filtering facility in Angus's freeware helps hugely with the boring stuff while not diminishing the skill and satisfaction of discovery.