Roy Osherove

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Essential Software to Install on a new computer

Update: Be sure to check out the comments on this post as well. Some good recommendations there (aside from the regular "just use linux" trolls)

I recently got a new laptop. here's what I installed in the first couple of days:

Installed:

- Office 2007

- FireFox (with addons below)

o TabMix Plus (Control tabs in firefox better)

o AdBlock (Block any annoying ad forever from showing on your browser)

o IE Tab (Allows using IE inside firefox for those "special" sites out there

- MemInfo tray (Shows memory usage in tray icon)

Free Download Manager (As the name says)

- BsPlayer (Great player, I have the pro version. Beats VLC and Media Player Classic for my taste). Note: the free version contains ads!

- KLite codec pack (Codecs to watch every type of movie format out there)

- Total Commander (The best file manager out there for my taste, though there are others people like)

- Notepad2 (Fast, free notepad replacement with syntax highlighting and not much else)

- IrfanView (Blazing Fast, free picture viewing program)

- DirectFolders (not free, but awesome extension for explorer which makes file and folder dialogs in windows actually usable)

- QuickTime (And remove all the crap that it installs using Autoruns from sysinternals)

- SysInternals Suite (best free set of tools for admins and developers to find out system info and do system things you never thought possible)

o Use autoruns to remove all the crap

- Camtasia (Great software for recording screen movies. You might also want to see if windows media encoder would work for you, as it's free)

- SnagIt (Quickly and easily take snapshots of the screen, from the same company who brought you Camtasia. lots of free alternatives for this out there)

- CoolEdit pro (old version of now Adobe's audio editing tool)

- WinRar

- TortoiseSVN ( Free and open source source control client for subversion)

- AnyDVD (So I can see DVDs from ANY region on my DVD drive. I can't believe I need such software at all, but reality sucks)

- Keepass (For keeping my passwords safe)

- LiveWriter (blog posting client from microsoft)

- Live Messenger (with addons below)

o Insert code from visual studio

o Enable Spelling (this seems to be no longer needed on my latest install of live writer. cool!)

- Google Desktop Search (I can't live without my Ctrl-Ctrl shortcut anymore. This also replaces any start-run replacements out there)

- VS 2005

o Resharper (Best VS 2005 addin since CodeSmart for VB6)

- FolderShare (Sync files and folders automatically on multiple machines)

- MS Virtual PC

- VMWare (what MS Virtual PC wants to be when it grows up)

- Omea reader(Great rss and news reader from the people who brought you resharper)

 

Am I missing something?