Tomas' log of stuff

I figured I'd do a little series of posts about which applications I install on my PC after a reinstall, and in what order. Mostly I thought it would be a nice idea for my own reference, maybe compare it to an update list in a few years and see what the changes are.

This is definately something that will need several posts, probably I'll do one or two apps pr posting, and I'll use this post to keep an updated index of the posts.

The order of the list is based on notes I made the last time I reinstalled both my home and work PCs, and will contain a "consolidated" list, some things I might install on the home PC, some on the work PC, and most of it on both. Where it makes sense I'll mention if it applies to just one of them. I'm including assorted utilities and helper apps, but I'm leaving out drivers and such. Still, some tools might be more or less hardware specific.

So, time to get on with the list! And the first thing that gets installed on all my computers is...

1. Opera
   

Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last few days, or don't really care at all, you'll know that Adobe has announced the CS3 edition of products and will be shipping (most) editions soon. Set aside all the fancy new stuff (and there is some GREAT new stuff in there almost regardless which products you use), one of the things I'm most anxiously waiting to see is if they *finally* fixed their bloody installers when it comes to the upgrade products.

This neat little tool called SQL Prompt will plug a hole in many of the tools I use on a semi-daily basis; intellisense functionality in most editors you'd care to use for SQL authoring. And the price is right :) (yeah, that means free)

At work I'm currently using Macromedia Adobe Captivate to create software demos & instructions, and it's a great tool with loads of timesaving features. But it's also a reasonably expensive tool for its narrow purpose. But I just discovered Wink, a freeware application that seems to work in a similar way. I've installed it and plan to give it some proper testing over the next few days.

Since my cool new workstation now runs a 64-bit CPU, I figure the natural thing to do is to install Windows XP x64. I'm a little apprehensive about the whole thing, thanks to mixed feedback from Baldido and other friends, reporting that this feels like "old" 32-bit Windows XP retrofitted with 64 bit support as an afterthought. Which I guess is actually what it is. Already, just a few hours after installation, I'm seeing some of these quirks surface. Also, I can't for the life of me understand the point of having separate \Program Files directories for native 64 bit apps and 32 bit apps. One of the first quirks I came across was during the installation of Adobe Creative Suite 2; XP x64 instructs it to default to \Program Files (WOW64), but according to the Adobe installer, ( is not a valid character in the installation path :) Furthermore neither PDF Printer driver in Acrobat 7 Pro nor the Flashpaper printer driver that comes with Studio 8 work under XP x64. Other quirks include some poorly coded apps that check the OS version before installing, and come up with Windows 2003 SP1 instead of XP, and thus refuse to install. Some also demand that you have SP2, which is a bit hard with XP x64. I got to say, I'm not impressed. I'll give it a chance tho...