Yesterday I installed the OS, AV and office so that I have access to e-mail. Next on the list are the additional Microsoft tools that I use in my job: Project Professional
2010, Visio 2010, Power Pivot and the various Outlook connectors.
During the installation of these other products, I am making some tweaks to Office. I have found that the best way to do this is to open Word and change the options in
there as all of the other programs in the Office suite (and Project Professional) pick up the settings. So the changes that I am making:
- Set my name and initials - There is nothing worse than opening a document to it locked for editing by “generic user”
- Set the workgroup templates location to be somewhere in “My Documents” that I can easily add new templates to.
As I go through the programs that I use the most, I pin them to the taskbar as well.
So, I have Project, Visio, Power Pivot and connectors for Outlook. Next on the list is to be able to synchronise data with my phone. I always take the opportunity to review
the list of contacts that gets synchronised to archive any contacts that I may not be likely to be contacting, e.g. old work colleagues.
Now for the tools that make life easier in the online world – TweetDeck & Live Writer.
Next is music – really it should be a higher priority but there are other ways to listen to music so it is not essential. Interesting feature of Media Monkey is that it does not come with an MP3 encoder and neither does Windows 7 Ultimate N so you have to install that separately.
Now comes the technical applications starting with SQL Management Studio and Business Intelligence Development Studio. Then come the Web Development and C# versions of Visual Studio 2010 Express.
Finally are all of the programs for printers, accounting and various other utilities.
And there I have it: a nice clean OS with all of the tools that I need on it and none of the remnants of Betas.