Ah, The Joys of Rebuilding Systems

I’m in the process of rebuilding my development system, always a sucky process.  Hopefully it will go faster after this round: I’m going to get all my shiny toys installed on the box, then use Acronis TrueImage to make a snapshot of the clean system. 

TrueImage lets you build a CD-based recovery disk to boot off of.  I’ll use that to restore my snapshot from my external USB drive.  I’ll most likely end up doing this once every couple months for the next half year or so — I’m working on a project which will have me loading and unloading a lot of tools, something guaranteed to drag down a system after a bit.

The list of tools I’ve got to load as part of my baseline is pretty cool.  You never realize how much stuff you end up using on a regular basis until you’ve got to reinstall all the goodies.  An uncomprehensive, schizophrenically-ordered list would run something like this:

Freeware/OpenSource

• GVim (“Yeah, baby!”)
• Notepad2
• Magnifixer
• Firefox
• Cool Firefox extensions: Auto Copy, BlogJetThis, LastTab, ColorZilla, IE View, Blog This, WebDeveloper, Moust Gestures, deLico.us
• PDFCreator
• The N series: NUnit, NCover (and NCoverBrowser), NAnt, NDoc
• GhostDoc
• TestDriven.NET
• Zanebug
• Slickrun
• TaskSwitchXP
• Trillian
• Tortoise SVN/CVS
• WinMerge
• UnleashIt
• Subversion
• FXCop
• Cygwin (see comments for GVim)
• CodeSmith2.6
• PocketMod
• Reflector (see comments for GVim)
• SnippetCompiler
• ProcessExplorer / TCPView / RegMon / FileMon (SysInternals, you guys rock!)
• whoami.exe
• Aaron Margosis’s gold security tools: MakeMeAdmin and PrivBar
• Jeff Key’s Ruler
• SourceMonitor, Vil
• IronPython
• FxCop
• Omea Reader

Visual Studio Extras

• GhostDoc
• ImportsSorter
• ModellingPowerToys
• CopySourceAsHTML
• NDoc
• VSNet*CommandPromptHere tools

There has to be more than this, but it’s all that comes to my list at the moment.

Commercial Crap

• MindManager (see comments for GVim)
• ReSharper (see comments for GVim)
• BlogJet
• WinZIP
• PaintShop Pro
• Norton Anti-Virus
• Visual Studio 6.x, 2003, 2005
• Visio
• MS Project
• SQL Server
• SQL Express
• Acronis True Image

I’m part way through VS2003 as I write this.  Thankfully a lot of the utils are simple xcopy installs from the backup I made. 

Whew!