Fresh Vista Installation, What To Install First?

October 13th, 2007

After a fairly successful year without any viruses, my WinXP laptop finally died the death of a thousand viruses. After two days of repeatedly running AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy I decided to just make the jump to Vista on the laptop. The unrelenting malware was just too much. I have no idea why Microsoft allows registry settings to launch any application at startup or the installation of Browser Helper Objects without notifying me or giving me an easy way to get rid of them. I put off running Vista as my primary system due to occasional issues on my secondary system, but a few annoyances is a little better than a PC overun with ads for online poker matches. I can only hope that Service Pack 1 is out soon. (The extreme optimist in me looks forward to a full .NET runtime and Visual Studio release on MacOS X sometime before 2014.)

Now with a fresh install, which surprisingly only took about 30 minutes from boot to DVD to logged in, I am now ready to configure everything from wireless networking mapping the network drives. I am also considering what software I want to install on this machine. So far my short list includes:

I am uncertain what I am going to do about Visual Studio 2008 because it is still a Beta release and I do not want to mess with uninstalling it when the final release comes out. I may create a Vista installation for Visual Studio 2005 and another separate one for Visual Studio 2008. I could also simply Ghost my installation right after the initial installation with all of the updates and go back to it for a "clean" environment later whenever something goes wrong. In my experience Ghost has just been a hassle and since the installation took less than an hour I may just take the hit later and do a full reinstall instead of bothering with Ghost.

As for games, I am not sure what I will install on the laptop. The usual suspects like Starcraft, Warcraft and Halo will make it on there sooner or later along with various Steam products.

What other "must have" applications should I know about?

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2 Responses to “Fresh Vista Installation, What To Install First?”

  1. Adam Nofsinger Says:
    October 15th, 2007 at 9:00 am

    foobar2000 - super quick and lite on the resource usage
    or Quintessential - like winamp only better skinning, plug-ins, and opens faster
    Combined Community Codec Pack - get all the audio/video codecs you should ever need in one easy install
    Real Alternative - lite, less "commercial" alternative to Real Player

    TUGzip
    KeePass - store all your passwords in an encrypted file
    Thunderbird - if you still have one of those archaic POP3 or IMAP accounts not forwarding to gmail
    Synergy - since you mentioned you have a secondary computer, "software kvm switch" is great for working both
    Windows Live Writer Beta
    MS Power Toys - PowerToy Calculator and TweakUI (do these exist for Vista?)

    Some stuff I use that is an alternative to what you use:
    Notepad++
    Find and Run Robot (FARR)
    OpenOffice
    Innotek VirtualBox

  2. Shevek Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 11:15 am

    There is an app which I have used for many years now which jumps in whenever a Startup object is created, wherever that may be on your system - Start Menu Startup folder, Run or RunOnce registry for Current and All Users, etc, etc.

    It's a great bit of freeware from Mike Lin called StartupMonitor - http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.