New Machine

http://ramblings.aaronballman.com/2008/02/new_machine.html

So I got my brand-spanking new desktop machine today (my old one barely lasted two years before it gave up the ghost), and I thought it would be fun to keep track of everything that I do to get a machine all set up "properly" for my needs. Step 1: reformat. I don't care what machine I get, who I get it from, etc. I always reformat it first thing -- this way, I can be sure the machine is setup the way I want it to be with no happy surprises. Today, I booted my new machine once just to see the state of things. I had 20+ desktop icons, and about 15 tray items. The amount of shovelware that gets put onto new machines is outrageous! Step 2: install the OS. This time, I went with Vista Ultimate SP 1, since it's been RTMed. I usually go with the latest OS for whatever hardware I've got. So far, it works just as well as Vista pre-SP1 did for me -- no issues so far. Step 3: configure the machine. This is always a blast! The first thing I do is make sure I have some form of network connection available to me. Then I start the configuration by ensuring there are no problem pieces of hardware by getting whatever drivers I require. In this case, I needed a driver for the wireless card (since it's a draft n card, it's pretty new) and one for the SM Bus Controller. Both were blindingly easy to grab. Once all the hardware has been taken care of, it's time to do the Update dance. You know the one: update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot. This went really smoothly though -- I only had to reboot one time, though I did get about five batches of updates. Vista does a pretty good job of updating items "in place." Part of this step is also setting up the OS the way I like it. For instance, I always configure Explorer to show me all files, and show file extensions. I also setup the display resolution, what desktop icons are shown, get rid of the Sidebar, etc. Step 4: Installations. Now comes the fun part! Here's the list of everything I installed to get my machine up and running:

1. File Transfer Manager (this pretty much has to be #1 since I need it to grab software from MSDN)
2. Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
3. Office 2007
4. Virtual PC 2007
5. MSDN library (April 2007)
6. Platform SDK
7. TortoiseSVN
8. Once #7 is installed, I fetch 1.1 GB of RB dev stuff
9. Bison (from #8)
10. DirectX SDK (from #8)
11. TextPad
12. WinRAR
13. Mozilla Firefox (and AdBlock Plus & AdBlock Element Hiding Helper extensions)
14. Mozilla Thunderbird
15. REALbasic (latest version, in this case: 2008r1)
16. "Utilities" -- this is a folder full of helper applications I drag from machine to machine. It includes:
    • accesschk
    • DbgView
    • depends
    • Filemon
    • Magnifier
    • Portmon
    • procexp
    • Propmon
    • tcpvcon
    • Tcpview
17. I also transfer over all my old music and documents from the previous machine, as well as favorites links and other settings.
18. Trillian
19. Other OSes for VPC (usually: Windows XP, Windows 2000 and one Linux distro)
20. WinDbg
21. PEBrowse Pro
22. Adobe Acrobat Reader (it's horribly obnoxious.. but I use it just enough that I need to have it)

Step 5: Software configuration. This is where I wander through the applications I've installed and start to configure them the way I like them. For instance, always-on tabs in FireFox, setup my e-mail accounts, etc. This part basically fills up time while I'm downloading and installing all of the software from Step 4. All in all, it usually takes the better part of 8 hours to take a new machine and get it set up to the point I'm entirely done with it. That's partially due to downloading things fresh instead of storing them on disk -- cutting that out would probably reduce the amount of time a fair amount. But I'd still say that it takes at least 5 hours to get something to the point I can actually be productive on it. Having not gotten the machine fully set up (I still am waiting for some stuff to download from MSDN), I can't tell you exactly how well the new machine works out for me. But I can tell you that so far, I'm really liking it. New hardware is always a blessing, and it's nice to be back at a desk to get work done (instead of feeling lazy while sitting on the couch with the laptop). I may report in after a week or two, but I doubt it'll be needed. Judging by the machine so far, this is going to be an awesome work box!