UDR Software Install

published: Thu, 14-Feb-2008   |   updated: Mon, 18-Feb-2008

One thing I didn't touch on in my previous post was what I installed on my new Ultimate Developer Rig.

First of all, it's mostly what I listed before. There were some changes, however.

Acronis True Image Home: Brilliant, brilliant program for backups, etc. Takes images of whole partitions. Wonderful. Should have used it ages ago. I now have images of the partitions of my (very) old Dell Inspiron 8000 and have donated the machine itself to charity (sans hard drive). Ditto my old Toshiba M200 tablet.

Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2): This replaces the individual Adobe Illustrator 9 and InDesign 2, and gives me Photoshop (oooh!) and Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.1. Now to shell out for the upgrade to CS3...

Amazon MP3 Downloader: For non-DRM-protected MP3s purchased from Amazon. Finally, I'm stopping buying CDs and I never really liked buying DRM-protected songs and albums from Apple's iTunes Store.

Audacity 1.2.6: I didn't install this, this time around, since the new Nero Suite has an audio recorder. Well, it probably did before but I didn't notice. Anyway I'll be trying it out.

FolderShare: Sharing personal files between my new desktop and my laptop so that I can just take my laptop and go on trips without worrying if I have all my data.

JungleDisk: Essential and secure off-site backups of my personal data on Amazon S3.

Kakuro Master: Hate the interface, but I'm getting into Kakuro.

Microsoft Money Plus Deluxe 2008: The free internet downloads from my financial institutions had run out from the previous version, so it was time to upgrade.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional: A worthy upgrade from the previous version.

Nero 8 Ultra Edition (8.2): The upgrade from the previous version, now supports Vista properly.

New York Times - Times Reader: Actually I've been using this for a while — an excellent example of what a WPF application can be and can do. It's free for people who have home delivery of the actual newspaper.

Nokia PC Suite: Not installed this time around, since I now have an AT&T Tilt, aka HTC Kaiser Tytn II, instead of the Nokia I used to have.

VMWare Workstation 6: An upgrade from the previous version; supports Vista for client and host.

ZTree 1.7: A worthy upgrade.

I would have also installed Palm Desktop, but even the latest version, just released, only supports Vista 32-bit, and not Vista 64-bit. Never mind, I can still use my laptop for that. Besides which, I don't really use my Clié for very much any more.

My phone however required downloading the latest WMDC (Windows Mobile Device Center), version 6.1, from Microsoft before I could properly sync it. This requirement surprised me to say the least: I was expecting the sync-ing of my smartphone to work right out of the box — I did have Windows Update active, etc. I consequently spent a bit of time googling for a solution to the issue before even I noticed that there was a new version to be had.