First Ten Programs on New Install? 1659
reddigitaldragon asks: "Some people re-install once a year, but if you're anything like me your machine is formatted at least once a month. After the OS is in, then come the favorite/must have/most used programs to install. My first installations for Windows (I use it; get over it): Trillian, Winrar, Firefox, Winamp, SmartFTP, Azureus, NMap, GKrellM, PowerDVD. What are your First 10 installed programs?" What are the first 10 programs you would install on a Windows machine? How about for a Unix machine?
Most important of all on Windoze Boxen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Updated drivers followed by Antivirus and Mozilla is what goes on my Windoze boxen first.
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have 4 computers that I work on and all of them have not been formatted since I first purchased them. Am I strange or something. I'm using Linux, Win2K and Mac OSX on the various machines. Am I odd?
Re:My First 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mac OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Heres my list of programs installed since the reformat a month ago:
LaunchBar
Yep, thats the beauty of the Mac: a rock solid system that doesn't necessetate reformating, and a good suite of software preloaded.
Simple (Score:1, Insightful)
What do you use your computer for? (Score:1, Insightful)
Pirate much? Those look like the perfect apps for making a HUGE pr0n collection. No wonder he reinstalls so much.
"Hey, Johnny, I need to use your computer tonight."
"Yeah, no problem, Mom. Let me just format and reinstall really quick."
Software firewall == BAD (Score:5, Insightful)
The best of the worst in software firewalls IMHO is Norton Internet Security. Good support, and if it hoses your TCP/IP stack (like most any software-based firewall has a tendency to do over time...), there's at least well documented support.
If they're a dialup user, security patch the hell out of the box and be done with it. If they're broadband, figure out a way to put a hardware solution in there. Don't compromise the stability of the TCP/IP stack with software filtering. I don't know how many machines I've had to rebuild the stacks on because of shitty software-based firewalls for Windows.
And, as always, YMMV.
Are y'all nuts? (Score:3, Insightful)
Market research (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My First 10... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure, maybe the same person who ends up having to format and reinstall his OS at least once a month? (Not saying poster was in his right mind...)
Seriously though, a note to reddigitaldragon:
If you know you're gonna reinstall and you know what you're gonna put on the system after installing, you really should invest in a copy of Ghost (or DriveImage, but I haven't worked with that, so I can't personally vouch for its functionality). It'll save you several hours each month. Do your install once, install your progs, defrag (for good measure) make a Ghost image, burn it to CD along with ghost.exe and next time the whole process will take you ~10 minutes.
Total Commander (Score:3, Insightful)
Kicking Midnight Commander's butt any day too.
Don't forget to look at its plugins [ghisler.com] either. If you're still looking to extend the functionality after that list, look here [totalcmd.net] too.
It's not free (in either meaning), however it's one of those software packages I'm prepared to buy. And if you don't, you can at least still use 100% of its feature set for as long as you wish. There's just a nag dialog at startup.
Re:My First 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
And will it compress Win32 filesystems properly? Oh no, wait, you're not compressing at all. How are you going to fit that image onto a CD? Oh, wait, that's not an image, it's just a directory tree.
Very helpful post otherwise - oh, wait, you weren't trying to be helpful, you were trying to prove that you've got more geek chops than I do. I'll do my best to be impressed, really.
Re:My First 10... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sysprep (use Google, tons if info) used with Ghosting tools allows more flexibility when restoring your computer to something with different hardware or distrubuting your image across more then one computer. Not a silver bullet and does take time to get working correctly across your hardware but worth it for anything more then a few different types of computers using only one master image.
Another quick tip is slipstreaming [petri.co.il]. Bascially you can inject service packs and hotfixes into your W2K/XP install media. When you use that media to install the OS from scratch, it is already "up to date" with the included fixes.
Re:My First 10... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My First 10... (Score:3, Insightful)
"cp
It looks to me like it copies the disk image."
Yes, it copies the disk image. And it puts it on the next hard drive in exactly the same state as it was on the first - as a tree of directories, with a huge collection of separate files, etc. I should have been more specific. Ghost will take the image and make a single image file, which can be much easier to work with.
"I don't see why you're asking about filesystems, since he's operating on the raw device. If you wanted to compress.. "cat
No, you don't see at all. Have you ever tried to bzip a raw 40GB NTFS partition with 1GB of data on it? You will get a file that's a good deal larger than 1GB. This is because bz2 doesn't understand NTFS well enough to know which are the empty blocks so it treats all of it as data.
Re:My First 10... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't you enable the built in firewall before putting the machine online?
If you don't like that, download a copy of zonealarm, stick it on removable media and install it before putting the machine online.
Re:Forget 7-Zip (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My First 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
Chris Benard [chrisbenard.net]
Re:My First 10... (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't want my image program to understand the filesystem. What happens if in a future version they decide not to support a certian filesystem, or if I switch operating systems and there's no unimager for my new operating system? Even if it is a bit of a waste of space, I'd rather just have the image program take a snapshot of the raw disk image, completyly agnostic to the filesystem. Then I can restore it however I want because there has been no interpretation of the data, it's just plan old raw data.
Re:My First 10... (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless obviously you are confusing deleting the icon with uninstalling or changing the default browser associations, I was under the impression that you can't uninstall this monstrocity.
Have things changed in the past few months?
First ten installs on my realy important computer (Score:2, Insightful)
WeSync - wireless and wired multiuser autosyncing of calendar and address books
5N Launch - assigns 21 apps to one hardware button
HandyShopper - mutliple databases, not all of which need be shopping lists
jPluck - capture web sites automatically, refresh at every wired sync
Mobipocket - eBook and eNews reader
1TouchTimer - quick handy reminder
EudoraWeb - text browser well suited to GPRS use
YAHM - the best hack (OS extensions) manager for Palms
Documents To Go 6 - read/write Word and Excel files better than PocketPCs
Mapopolis - all my state's maps on hand, always
Oh, and all but the last two are Freeware.