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

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)