Five good apps to kick off a new Windows desktop

ISO image mounter/Virtual optical drive (Daemon Tools)

Given the amount of software testing I do, I download software all the time. A lot of what I need comes in the form of ISO files. So one of the first tools I install on my new Windows systems is an ISO image mounter called Daemon Tools Lite. Although Daemon Tools can do a bunch of other stuff, I use it just to mount ISO images on virtual CD/DVD drives that the software creates. This allows me to load an ISO as if I were inserting a disc into a CD drive.

ISO image mounter/Virtual optical drive (Daemon Tools)

Daemon Tools installs itself to the system tray and provides a shortcut menu that allows you to manage the virtual media that’s mounted on the managed virtual optical drives. Here's what the Daemon Tools interface looks like.

Antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials)

In a recent article, I wrote about the latest beta for Microsoft Security Essentials. I’ve been a big fan of MSE for quite a while. It’s free, it’s lightweight, and it gets the job done at the right price.

Screen capture tool (HyperSnap)

You may know that I tend to write. A lot. And much of my work includes screenshots. For a number of years, I’ve been using a tool called HyperSnap from a company called Hyperionics. Over the years, HyperSnap has been improved, but it’s always been a robust screen capture app.

Screen capture tool (HyperSnap)

Up until version 7, which came out recently, I’ve had nothing but great things to say about each new release of the product. Version 7, however, feels like a small step backward to me. It’s still a great tool, but some of the ease of use has gone away. Older versions made it really easy to, for example, cut a vertical or horizontal strip out of a captured image. But version 7 has rearranged the interface and “hidden” some of the great stuff under layers.

But I'm still a huge fan of the product, and as long as they keep making it, I’ll keep upgrading!

Blogging tool (Windows Live Writer)

Again… I write a lot and I use a variety of tools to do so. I do a lot of my work in Word, but I also publish a lot of items directly to Wordpress-based blogs. I can use Word for that as well, but I actually like Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer tool much better. It does an admirable job of getting formatting right and dealing with images, so I can focus on creating content. Setting up Writer is really easy, too. Simply point it at your blog and provide credentials and Writer does the rest of the setup.

Hypervisor (VMware Workstation)

I test everything under the sun. I have a great lab set up that runs Hyper-V, but I also use VMware Workstation on my desktop. The primary reason I moved to Workstation 8 was because of its ability to pass VT/AMD-v hardware virtualization extensions through to virtual machines. This makes it possible to test in a virtual environment software that depends on these extensions being present.

I’ve been a Workstation user from the very beginning. I’ve tried everything else as well, including VirtualBox and Virtual PC, but I’ve always returned to Workstation. It’s extremely feature rich and, while it’s not free like the others, the features have outweighed the cost.