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My Application Stack

Written on May 6, 2008 by Conor O'Neill

I’ve been struggling with Vista on a Dell D420 laptop recently. It is described as “Vista Capable”. It is nothing of the sort. So tonight I reverted back to XP Pro and have started the long slow re-install of all my favourite applications. This is what I pretty much always install on XP machines now:

  • Windows XP SP2 plus all updates
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Firefox (plus some standard add-ons)
  • KeePass password manager
  • Nokia N-Series PC Suite
  • PDFCreator
  • AVG Anti-Virus
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader
  • Pidgin Instant Messenger
  • Filezilla FTP Client
  • Skype
  • OpenOffice
  • Sun Java JDK
  • Putty SSH Client
  • MySQL Tools
  • Adobe Flash
  • Adobe Shockwave (no idea why I need this!)
  • Activestate Python 2.5 (plus a bunch of modules)
  • Adobe AIR
  • Twhirl Twitter Client
  • Google Toolbar x2
  • Google Gears
  • Azureus Bittorrent Client
  • JungleDisk Amazon S3 Backup
  • Paint.NET
  • Subversion version control
  • bzr version control
  • Flock Browser
  • Quicktime (only when needed)
  • RealPlayer (or Real Alternative)

Any other interesting ones you use?

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3 Comments on “My Application Stack”

  1. johnbillion | May 6th, 2008at 11:48 pm

    Reverting to XP? Eugh, XP’s non-existant anti-aliasing will make your eyes bleed.

    Real Alternative is the one to go for. Don’t you dare put RealPlayer on there ;-)

    Give Foxit Reader a try instead of Acrobat. Less memory intensive and it’s pretty polished now.

    Also, try WinSCP instead of FileZilla. It doesn’t suit everyone, and I’m not sure that the FTP support is fantastic (it’s an SFTP client by nature), but I swear by it. Related: if your host doesn’t support SFTP, get onto them!

    I presume by “Subversion” you mean TortoiseSVN et al? If not, try it.

    Other apps?

    Windows Grep (WinGrep) is a godsend if you do much coding. I don’t know how I lived without it.

    For unzipping, 7Zip is a good free alternative to WinZip, alhough it’s definitely not without its annoyances.

    I’m starting to sound like a free software evangelist now, so I’ll shut up.

  2. Conor O'Neill | May 7th, 2008at 12:16 am

    Thanks John. I’ll check those out (7-zip shudda been on there already).

  3. Conor O'Neill | May 7th, 2008at 6:16 pm

    How could I forget editors?!

    I use PSPad for day-to-day basic editing. Tons of features including syntax highlighting and it loads-up almost as quickly as Notepad.

    I don’t really do heavy-duty development any more so I jump between a variety of different high-end editors and IDEs including Komodo Edit, Eclipse, XEmacs, Emacs etc etc.

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