I managed to leverage an issue with my work issued laptop into a new one. It's a LATITUDE E6500 from Dell, and since it's been a while since I've set up a Windows machine, I'm documenting what I do here so I can reference the details next time.
Firstly, it came to me with Windows XP and Microsoft's Office Suite installed. It also had the company install of McAfee and Power DVD DX. The rest was up to me.
I have licenses for three commercial apps I use regularly. These are Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat. I started by installing these programs.
I use portable versions of Firefox and Filezilla, my preferred browser and ftp client, so I simply copied these off of a flash drive and didn't miss a beat. I can't tell you how sweet this is. All my bookmarks, add-ons, preferences, passwords and cookies in tact. Damn.
All my music, pictures and source files reside on an external hard drive, so it was plug and play on that front. That just left me with a few free applications to install, like 7-Zip, µTorrent, iTunes, QuickTime, Audiograbber and Google Chrome.
That's it. More and more of what I do has moved into the browser. As apps move to the web, there's less and less to install.
What an age we live in.
