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!

This, of course, means jack-all if the software is crap. Fortunately, it is not crap. In fact, it’s quite good. The fine folks at Ars Technica have a first-look that is favorable, but I’ve been using the beta myself for a couple months on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista PCs so I thought I would offer my two cents.

First, it’s reasonably lean. On my 64-bit system, it generally uses less than 100MB of RAM (usually more like 70MB). That’s not the leanest background app around, but it’s not the worst offender, either. Windows Defender gets disabled (MSE is a superset of the Windows Defender stuff) so those system resources get freed up, which offsets the “cost” of MSE.

Second, it stays out of the way of my other programs. I haven’t noticed any change in system performance. It doesn’t screw up any of my games. I get the same firewall permission prompt with new games I always get in Windows, but that’s it. It doesn’t seem to run scans while I’m doing other system-intensive stuff. After a couple months of running this thing, I really can’t tell the difference between it being there and not being there, unless it catches something. Which is good.

Third, it appears to work. New virus and other malware definitions are updated practically every day. Windows Update will deliver them, and of course you can update by hand. I purposely downloaded a couple keygens and other programs from torrent sites that people said were infected, and MSE did indeed detect the bad stuff and prompt me to clean it. Cleaning the infected file (usually deleting it, sometimes quarantining it) is generally a one-click affair.

For now, I see no reason not to choose Microsoft Security Essentials as a free anti-spyware alternative. Many of the pay antivirus packages offer all kinds of extra features, like rootkit removals and more advanced firewalls and anti-email phishing stuff and all. If you want that stuff, go get AVG or something. But compared to products like AVG Free, MSE seems to stack up just fine. Frankly, if you don’t go around clicking on things you know you have no business clicking on, and if you keep up to date with your Windows Updates, you probably don’t need more protection than the free packages offer.

Of course, the real security firms will test the software against hundreds or thousands of known threats and get a really detailed take on how well it protects you. Maybe against that sort of testing, it’ll turn out to be crap. But hey, it’s free and so far, I like it. So if you’re not running any sort of anti-malware other than the basic Windows Defender that comes in Vista or Windows 7, go ahead and give this a whirl.

Now, if Microsoft really wanted to secure Windows, they’d work a deal with Adobe to offer updates to Flash through Windows Update. Not to distribute it in the first place, but if someone has it installed, they’d get updates that way. Flash is on like 95% of all desktop and notebook computers and it’s just chock full of potential attack vectors for malware. Adobe keeps closing the holes, but nobody ever updates their Flash software. I know Microsoft is all about positioning Silverlight against Flash and Adobe Air, and that’s all well and good. But I don’t see how providing updates to people who already have the software will really change that, and it’ll make Windows a gazillion times more secure.

My main complaint? No Windows 7 drivers. HP still has no Win7 drivers for any of their printers or all-in-ones. And they’re not alone. I don’t see Win7 drivers for Epson or Lexmark, or a host of other peripheral manufacturers, either.

Why is this a problem? Doesn’t my printer print using the drivers built into Windows 7? Yes, it does. Win7 did an amazingly good job of just finding my network printer in seconds and spitting out prints. But it’s basic. If you want full control over your printer, like checking ink levels and such, you need the HP software. You need the HP software for the scanner to work over the network with your PC (you can always scan and dump to an SD card or something). In most cases you don’t get support if you’re not using the manufacturer drivers, or installing them will be the first thing support will tell you to do.

What’s the hold up? I’m sure HP’s company line is that they’ll have drivers when Windows 7 is available. Not good enough. Certainly that philosophy isn’t good enough for their notebooks, which list Windows 7 32- and 64-bit drivers on a whole host of models.

First of all, Windows 7 is available. I have a legal, full, final copy right now. TechNet and MSDN subscribers have access for weeks, which is how I got it.

More importantly, the general public has had access to Windows 7 beta since early January. The whole point of this beta is for users to test out their hardware and software with Windows and find the problems. Sometime between beta and release, HP (and everyone else) is supposed to release their Windows 7 drivers so the public can try them out and report problems. This is how a company releases really solid drivers right at the release of a new OS. It is almost impossible to really get the kinks out with just your internal testing, and the resulting support calls can kill profits. AMD and Nvidia have figured this out, and have been shipping and updating Windows 7 drivers throughout the beta process.

So get with the program, HP. Win7 is “hot” right now. You should have a big badge on the front page that says “Ready for Windows 7. Get your Windows 7 drivers and support here!” It should take you to a whole page themed and dedicated to owners of HP products, all of them, getting Windows 7 drivers and support. That’s what we like to call an “obvious marketing opportunity.” And if Windows 7 rolls around and there’s no proper driver for my not-at-all-old-and-should-still-be-supported product, I guess you’ll lose my future business.

Every site on the ‘net is going to test it’s speed relative to this or that setup. Some will use whatever machine they have lying around, some will construct machines to hit specific spec targets. This ZDNet article does a pretty good job. This browser comparison on BetaNews is somewhat questionable (mixing feature support and standards compliance tests with performance tests to single scores). DailyTech, for some reason, only used 32-bit (when 64-bit is so popular these days).

One thing none of the benchmarks show, but you hear again and again from those that use Windows 7, is just how much more “responsive” and “snappy” it feels. The time between when you click and something happens is noticeably diminished. You really notice it when you go back and use a machine with XP or Vista on it. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that benchmark applications simply don’t show, and is very hard to measure. Don’t take my word for it…ask any tech journalist who had to set up and run Windows 7 vs. Vista vs. XP benchmarks for a recent article. Every one I’ve met (and this is the kind of company I keep) will say that numbers aside, Win7 feels much faster. As intangible as that may seem, it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind when you see miles of bar charts comparing Office performance and PCMark Vantage scores and whatnot.

1. Make your USB thumbdrive bootable.

2. Set your BIOS to boot from USB (or change the boot order so it tries the USB device first).

3. Extract and copy the entire contents of the .ISO file (I use WinRAR) or the whole contents of the DVD to the USB drive.

Then you just reboot with the USB drive in, and it’ll be just like you were installing off the DVD…only probably much faster, and a lot easier to carry around.

I’m going to skip parts 2 and 3 above. Every BIOS is different, so all I can say there is “look for the boot menu” and maybe “have your USB thumbdrive inserted when you start up your PC so the BIOS sees a drive there.” If you can’t dump files from the ISO (again, WinRAR or any program that opens up ISOs) or copy from the DVD, this advice might be a little above your comfort level.

So how to make a bootable USB thumbdrive? It’s simple.

First, format the drive. Just right-click it in Windows Explorer and choose Format. Go ahead and use NTFS, and Quick Format is fine.

Once that’s done, you’ll need to use a program called bootsect to add the filesystem bootcode. You can find bootsect.exe in the \boot\ directory of your Windows Vista or Windows 7 DVD, or you can download it. Fire up a command prompt (right-click and choose Run as administrator), go to the directory where bootsect is (such as D:\boot\ if you’re running it off your Windows Vista/7 DVD) and type the following:

bootsect /nt60 e:

Where e: is the drive letter of your USB thumbdrive. Be very careful about that. Do not type in the drive letter of one of your other drives, or you may make bad things happen. We’re telling it to add the filesystem bootcode sectors to our e: drive, for NTFS 6.0.

Now you have a USB thumbdrive that is ready to be booted. Of course, it doesn’t have any of the necessary boot files on it yet. If you tried to boot from it now, you’d get a “BOOTMGR is missing” type error. All you have to do now is copy all the files from within the Windows 7 ISO (not the ISO itself) or all the files from the DVD to your USB drive. Then make sure your BIOS is set to boot from USB, reboot, and install Win7.

This works for Vista, too. But you don’t want to install Vista, do you?

Then I spotted this tip in a user forum.

Instead of going to your usual subscriber downloads space that wants to use the Microsoft File Transfer Manger, hit the Top Downloads navigation at the top of the page. As seen here.

This will kick off the Akamai download manager, where the speed is about a gazillion times better. What’s a “gazillion times better”? Well in my case, it’s nearly 2 MB/sec.

Even starting a couple hours later and starting the download over, I’ll be done long before the Filter Transfer Manager would. In fact, I started just before I made this post, and now I have about 20 minutes left.

In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. I spent a good bit of time yesterday evening backing everything up, because I’m going to wipe my system out totally and start from scratch. Of course, I’m running the Release Candidate of Win7 today, so this is something of a formality. I use these new OS releases as an excuse to really back up all my stuff to an external hard drive. That part is easy.

The more complicated part is downloading and dumping into a folder on said external drive all the drivers I’ll need (not many, just audio, graphics, and Razer mouse) and all the downloadable programs I use. WinRAR, VLC, bDule, Zune, iTunes, Steam, Impulse, web browsers, the list goes on and on.

Later today, I’ll nuke my hard drive from orbit, boot to a bootable USB key with the Win7 files on it, and start the reinstall game. I’ll check in with word on how that’s going.

Update: Well, everything went totally smoothly. The worst part was the painfully slow downloading, until I found out this tip. Well that, and the interminable boredom of re-installing all my applications. Today I update my notebook. At least I have the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo to wile away the hours.