Andy Grove's Weblog

Unfortunately a corrupted hard drive meant I had to reinstall my main desktop machine from scratch on Monday. My most important data - my source code - is always backed up in version control and on build machines so I wasn't too worried about the risk of losing anything but the real cost was 24 hours lost productivity. However, it did hit home that I don't have adequate backups of my Outlook PST files (more than 2GB worth) so I'm going to take steps to improve that soon.

My machine is running fine now. In fact it's running much faster - as is the way just after a fresh install. I might even invest in a copy of Norton Ghost and a DVD burner for this machine so I can do fresh installs more easily in the future.

Over the year or so since I installed this machine I've built up the usual collection of software products that bloat the machine and a reinstall is the perfect time to reflect on what's actually essential, useful, or redundant.

The essentials are pretty unsurprising:

• Windows XP Professional SP2
• Norton Antivirus
• Microsoft Office
• Cloudmark Spam Filter
• Firefox
• Trillian
• Skype
• WinZip Pro

Then the main development tools:

• Java
• Apache Ant
• IntelliJ IDEA
• JProfiler
• Install4j
• Visual Studio C++ .NET
• Apache C++ Standard Library (stdcxx)
• Cygwin
• MySQL 5.0
• VMWare Workstation
• Apache Tomcat 5
• FireStorm/DAO (naturally!)

After that, there's a whole host of open source Java class libraries and products too numerous to mention here but most of these are in version control anyway so I don't need to reinstall them individually.

And what will I leave off this time? Basically all the gadgets, toolbars, and background processes that slowly but surely reduce system performance and increase memory usage. The only product that I'll miss in this category is Google Desktop but since I only have two places to look for data - My Documents and Outlook - I'll just have to learn to be more organized and a bit more patient when searching for data.