As a developer, what changes do you make to a vanilla Windows install?

Question

When I get a vanilla Windows system, there\'s a bunch of stuff I change to make it more developer-friendly.

Some of it I remember every time, other stuff I only do as an

Answer 1

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned ClipX. I find that I can't develop without this clipboard history tool.

Answer 2

I add Wordpad to the Send To context menu. Instructions for XP here. Works in Vista, as well.

Answer 3

I like to:

• Make the taskbar larger so that it can hold two rows of applications
• Disable personalized menus in the start menu
• Disable grouping of similar taskbar items

I also randomly open a lot of PuTTY sessions to various machines, so I like to create a "bin" directory in my home folder, add it to the PATH, and then create a shortcut to PuTTY in it named "p" (among other shortcuts). I can then easily Windows-R (run) and type p [putty-session-name] to open the session. This has saved me tons of time / mouse clicks.

Answer 4

1. Switch to classic menu
2. Increase the taskbar hight to have more shortcuts & lock the taskbar
3. Performance options -> Adjust for best performance
4. Copy all the backed up shortcuts files to Favorites folder
5. Install necessary software (JDK, DBMS stuff, Editplus, MS Office etc.)
6. Driver for soundcard
7. New network connection for Broadband ...

Answer 5

I generally leave Windows Defender online but I don't use an antivirus so....

I set my start menu to display small icons and to have no "most recently used programs" active. Instead I pin everything to my start menu:

My start menu http://www.robpaveza.net/pub/startmenu.png

I also make sure that all the extension menus are actual menus, not just links, and that my computer and user files icons are shown on the desktop.

Answer 6

Step 1: Fix windows

• Turn off System Restore
• Turn off Windows Defender
• Uninstall any OEM-supplied antivirus or other crapware if it's an OEM box
• Get SysInternals AutoRuns and lay the smackdown to all the 8000 useless startup items and services vista inflicts upon you, including the slow and useless vista search indexing service.

Step 2: Install stuff.

Now that my shiny new Core 2 Duo PC isn't bogged down with useless crap running like a 386, I can build it up again

• Install Firefox
• Install FlashPlayer firefox plugin (why oh why isn't this bundled with FF?)
• Run windows update and let it do it's download/reboot cycle 50 times until it's happy
  • While this is happening I can use firefox to browse stackoverflow and read reddit :-)
• Get UnixUtils and either unzip them to system32, or otherwise make sure they are in the path.
  • This is neccessary because I can't stand cygwin, yet my muscle memory keeps typing ls when I try to type dir, and windows still hasn't heard of grep yet
• Install Droid Sans Mono and Monaco fonts for programming
• Install E-TextEditor
• If I'm installing visual studio, do that. If not install the .NET framework runtime instead
• Install Firefox addons (firebug, fission, web developer, adblock)