- Sister's 17th birthday
- Family reunion
- A family member left the US
- Work machine hard drive crashed
- Won a silver medal in the Paralympics.
Just kidding about that last one. But I could totally p0wn there.
Seriously, having your work machine hard drive die on you is pretty shaking for a software developer. Here's the list of software I've had to install and configure on my new machine over the last few days:
- WinRar - zip utility
- Visual Studio 2005 + service pack - software development environment
- Consolas - font pack
- TestDriven.NET - software test runner
- GhostDoc - XML documentation plugin
- Krypton Toolkit - UI library software
- Red Gate ANTS profiler - software performance and memory profiler
- Lutz Reflector - software analyzer
- RssBandit - gotta have my RSS feeds to keep up on the blogs
- Windows XP service pack 3 + updates - gotta have the latest security patches
- Twhirl - Tweet from your desktop. Nifty.
- Silverlight - video/audio plugin for web browsers
- .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 - software runtime
- Adobe Air - software runtime
- LiveMesh - keep my work and home machines synced up
- Firefox 3 - best web browser around
- Cruise Control .NET tray - distributed software build watcher
- SlickRun - never have to use your start menu again
- AVG antivirus
- IE tab - plugin for Firefox
- Flashblock - plugin for Firefox, never see another annoying Flash ad
- TextPad - good text editor
- Notepad2 - another good text editor
- MbUnit - software test runner
- GTalk - Google's instant messenger
- Greasemonkey - add-on extension for Firefox
- CPhog - browse CodeProject.com with ease
Yeah. Busy.
Things are settling now, so a return to our regular scheduled postings is in coming down the pipes. Thanks for hangin' tight, fine blog readers.
Same here. What a pain. This is my routine for any machine.
ReplyDeleteI make a base install to alleviate all that.
Include latest SP and all software I NEED. (Misc stuff left out to reduce size).
Partition the HD. ~8 to 20GB for the OS the rest for the files.
Use Norton Ghost 8.0 to make a working image.
Make sure to delete the swap file before making image, will save about 1-2GB on the image file size.
Backup image file(s) to DVD incase whole drive fails.
Also helps to restore Windows in about 10min, incase it get funky.
The “D” drive backups up each night to a Raid5 server. USB drive will do.
Blessings,
Lou,
ReplyDeleteYou're a smart guy. That's awesome you can get back up and running in 10 minutes.
I'm too lazy to setup a Ghost image! I think it's not just me, either, I know a lot of software devs who just won't put in the effort to get a workable backup solution in place.
It's ironic that most software developers are lazy like this. The children of the cobbler go shoeless. :-)