It’s going to be a long weekend…

With the help of my good friend Keith Crawford, I plan on reformatting my primary development machine today and doing a clean install of Windows 7. This project is long overdue, I can’t remember the last time I reformatted my drive, in fact this SATA drive that I am using now initially ran XP and then VISTA before I upgraded to WINDOWS 7 last year.  Fortunately I am pretty diligent when it comes to backups, so the project isn’t as daunting as it could be.

Where to Start Reloading Software??

While preparing my plan of action last night I went through my list of installed software to see what I would need to reinstall once I got the OS reloaded.  After going over the list I realized that I don’t use half of the programs that are installed on my machine.  This got me to thinking, what else is out there that I might be missing out on? What tools / software do you use to develop client projects?

Here’s a list of the software and desktop applications that I use, please leave me a comment and let me know what you are using and if there is something on the market that I need to look at…

• Microsoft Outlook (Productivity) – Email, Calendars, Tasks, Notes, etc.
• Evernote Desktop (Productivity) – Notes.
• Microsoft Office Ultimate (Productivity) – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
• Microsoft Live Writer (Blogging) – WYSIWYG Blog Editor.
• Jasc Paintshop Pro (Graphics) – Lightweight compared to PS and faster for some jobs.
• Adobe Photoshop (Graphics) – All of the Bells & Whistles for Graphics.
• Adobe Illustrator (Vector) – I haven’t found anything else that compares for Illustrations.
• Adobe Dreamweaver (Code Editor / WYSIWYG) – My favorite WYSIWYG editor.
• Notepad++ (Code Editor) – Probably my favorite straight up code editor.
• Eclipse (Code Editor / IDE) – Rarely do I use this anymore.
• Xlinesoft PHPRunner (Code Editor / IDE / Generator) – Saves a ton of time
• Microsoft Expression Web (Code Editor / WYSIWYG) – Rarely do I use this anymore.
• Coda (Code Editor / WYSIWYG / CSS Editor) – Very nice but only works on my MacBook.
• TopStyle Pro (CSS Editor) – I haven’t found anything that compares
• IPSwitch WS-FTP Professional (FTP) – All of the Bells & Whistles for FTP
• Filezilla (FTP) – Fewer features than WS-FTP but a lot faster.
• Camtasia (Screen Capturing / Recording) – I haven’t found anything that compares.
• SwishMax (Flash / Vector Animation) – A lot faster than Flash to work with .SWF files.
• Audacity (Audio Editing / Recording) – I haven’t found anything that compares.
• Garage Band (Audio Editing / Recording) – Only works on my MacBook
• EZ Audio CD Ripper (Audio Editing / Ripping) – Fastest CD to MP3 Ripper I have found.
• Skype (Communications) – My favorite chat, voice, video conferencing app.
• RingCentral Call Controller (Communications) – Ties into our corporate phone system.
• SSH Explorer (SSH) – Rarely do I have to use this anymore because we have an admin.
• MySQL Administrator (Database) – I occasionally use this to connect to databases.
• TJPing (Ping) – I sometimes use this instead of command line.
• PuTTy (SSH, Telnet) – Rarely do I use this anymore because we have an admin.