I set up a new work computer a while back and was logging everything I installed on it. In order. Perhaps for a list of My Essential Software, with commentary. But then I forgot I was doing it. And so I've now installed a bunch more stuff. Of course, most of it isn't essential. And now I'm just going to publish the list because I'll never getting around to writing much commentary, or even, hell, linking the titles.
Fascinating, huh?!
The machine started was a 2.4 Ghz Dell tower with 512MB of RAM, running WinXP Pro. It came with Microsoft Works and a bunch of other free crap. Here are the first 25 programs I installed (over a couple weeks).
- WS_FTP. Oddly, this was the first thing I installed. I didn't consider it essential at all—in fact, I don't think I even have it on my other 'puter. I usually use the command line. But I needed to see the progress of a great-big download, and the built-in FTPing in explorer was not working right.
- Zinf. For music playing. Had this cool feature, where you could download an entire album at once from eMusic (which I subscribe to). Then eMusic replaced it. Or bought it, I'm not sure. I like it as a music player, though. And free.
- Putty. SSH client.
- Trillian. IM. (I hate IM.)
- Microsoft Outlook 2002. For mails and stuffs.
- Cisco VPN 5000 client. Required to connect to our Exchange server, which we outsource.
- Adobe Acrobat Reader. For reading the instructions for getting the VPN set up.
- Nelson Email Organizer. Alernative interface for Outlook. Kicks ass. Sorta.
- SpamAssasin Pro. Great spam killer. Until it died.
- QuickTime. I don't remember why I possibly needed this.
- Visual SlickEdit. For writin' the code.
- Java JDK 1.3.1. For compilin' and runnin' the code.
- Photoshop 5.5/ImageReady 2.0 For making the pictures. I almost never use Photoshop, actually. ImageReady is enough for me.
- HomeSite 4.0 I still use HomeSite (usually 5.0, but this was handy) for writing HTML/JSP, etc. And SlickEdit for Java. Though both are decent for both.
- AnalogX TSDropCopy. For the draggin' and the droppin'. Didn't work for me, though.
- Photoshop 6.0/ImageReady 3.0. Found this CD, which obsoleted the other one, but I think they're both on here now.
- Microsoft Office 2000 Pro (sans Access, Word, and Outlook). Finally needed to use Excel, probably.
- Microsoft ActiveSync (for Pocket PC). For my Pocket PC. I should write about my Pocket PC sometime...
- Mozilla. For the testing. I still haven't gotten in the habit of using it.
- Netscape 4.08. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Testing.
- Cloudmark SpamNet. SpamAssassin stopped working. Tried this. Didn't work at all.
- WinCVS. Open source Windows GUI for CVS. Pretty nice.
- Opera. For testin'.
- Netscape 6
- CygWin
Fascinating, huh?!