Upgrading to Windows 7? Sure, a lot of noise has been made about whether or not you can do an “in-place upgrade” or not, depending on which version of Windows you’re going from and which version of Win7 you’re going to. My advice – never do an in-place upgrade. If it’s a major new operating system, wipe your drive and start fresh. It’s nothing if not a good excuse to back up all your precious data.
Maybe you’re not doing an upgrade. Maybe you’re shopping around for a new PC. Either way, the biggest pain in the butt with getting a new PC or wiping your drive and starting fresh with a new OS is re-downloading and installing all those indispensable apps you use every day. (Well, the biggest pain is actually backing up all your photos and music and stuff – but you really should be doing that anyway.)
Enter one of the greatest websites in all creation, Ninite.com (no, that’s not hyberbole). It’s an idea so brilliant, so simple, and so useful that I wonder why it hasn’t been done years ago.
Visit ninite.com and you’ll see, right there on the front page, a list of checkboxes for commonly used Windows applications and utilities. It’s all categorized, and most of the big “must haves” are there. Check the ones you want to install, and hit the little “Get Installer” button at the bottom. This will download a tiny (less than 200k) executable which, when run, will download all the apps you picked and install them. There are no prompts, no sites to visit, nothing to sign up for. It installs all the apps to their default locations with default settings.
Take, for example, the notebook I just upgraded to Windows 7. I head to ninite.com, and check the boxes for Chrome, Firefox, Skype, Pidgin, iTunes, VLC, Hulu Desktop, Picasa, Microsoft Security Essentials, Adobe Reader, Flash (both IE and non-IE), Silverlight, uTorrent, Dropbox, Steam, and WinRAR. Hit the button, run the exe (which downloads in two seconds because it’s so small), and walk away. I come back later and all those apps are installed and ready to roll.
Genius.
It’s even smart enough to recognize that I’m running 64-bit Windows and grab the 64-bit versions of apps like iTunes, Security Essentials, and WinRAR. All they need to do now is add the Zune software and Ventrilo to their list and it’ll have literally everything I need on a new PC install (outside of boxed products and games). Try it. You’ll love it.
Dear ninite.com people – work your magic on a site for drivers!
#1 by Substance242 on December 4, 2009 - 11:49 pm
Ready to roll? You’ll spend half a day configuring them, that’s where the most time is wasted.
#2 by longo213 on December 6, 2009 - 2:32 pm
Not when you back up your settings (like INI files) or whole folders with settings of your favourite apps from App Data folder. Add them into ZIP, after reinstallation of the OS unzip them into respective paths and you’re good to go for Ninite.
#3 by bottleUp on March 18, 2010 - 10:03 pm
I myself use magic-downloader for my software downloads as it saves all the installation time, you can use the app double click right away. No spyware , no system trash ,no changing in Windows registry , my computer is running as fast as its new no matter how many apps I downloads with magic-downloader freely . Amazing!