So the new baby arrived yesterday afternoon and I now (barring XP updates) have everything installed and setup the way I want it.

Software installed:

Antivirus - ClamWin
Network Switching - Avanquest Connection Manager
WiFi Discovery - Network Stumbler
File Manager - xplorer2 Lite
IM: Windows Live
Twitter Client - TweetDeck (incl Adobe Air)
Codecs - XP Codec Pack 2.4.6 & Quicktime Alternative
Browser - Firefox Portable
Email - Thunderbird Portable
Office - AbiWord Portable
SFTP/FTP - FileZilla Portable
SSH/Telnet - PuTTY Portable
Media players - VLC Portable & Media Player Classic
PDF Viewer - Sumatra PDF Portable

Other - Startup Inspector for Windows, DCS Command Line Tools and ProcMon (from sysinternal/microsoft)

All the portable apps are available from PortableApps. Designed really for removable drives, they run fast and leave no footprint on the machine - just what I need.

With Firefox I have installed the following addons:
Foxmarks - bookmark management/syncing
Adblock Plus - to speed up browsing
Text2Link - to highlight text and open as a URL

To maximise my screen space while browsing:
Installed the Hide Menubar addon that hides the menubar and pops it back when you press Alt
Made all the icons small
Removed the status bar
Made the XP Start bar auto-hide
Removed the Bookmarks Toolbar (get Bookmarks with Ctrl-B)

Now its very useable :)

PuTTY Portable is setup so that I can SSH into my Linux box at home and it automatically sets up tunnels to IMAP and SMTP. This means I can get all my email from my home server inside an SSH tunnel (see my previous post about that) from wherever I am.

I have tested my external DJ drive on it and that works fine, I've tested MixMeister Fusion on it and that works fine (provided you make sure you don't run anything else much on the machine) and have also used by little USB soundcard (for live mixing/preview) without any problems. Whether I will actually ever use it for a live performance will remain to be seen, but I have the option.

NetStumbler allows me to find access points when I am travelling and hopefully find free APs to use.

Damned handy :)

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[link]   Posted @ 19:09