It's that time again. On my work PC, I'm going to have to reinstall my two year old installation of Windows XP Pro. It's been on a downward spiral for a couple of months now, but there are so many things I have to do after a clean install I've been putting this inevitable moment off. It can wait no longer.

As a result, I'm preparing to get back to where I need to be in as little time as possible. Below are the applications I will install immediately following the installation of XP Pro.

• Firefox - Always your first install
• iTunes - For playing my MP3s
• Office Suite - A necessary evil
• Trillian - My preferred instant messenger client for communicating throughout the day with the Yahoo! users and MSN faithful
• WS FTP - My preferred FTP client
• Putty - My preferred telnet/ssh client
• Win SCP - A great SFTP and SCP client for Windows
• Snag-It - A great little screen capture utility
• QuickTime Player - For videos
• Search and Replace 98 - A time saver for a heavy duty XHTML guy like me
• Audiograbber - For ripping CDs to MP3
• Spybot S&D - For protecting my PC from spyware
• Nero - For burning CDs
• Adobe Acrobat - For producing PDF

Then there are various Firefox plugins, anti-virus software and work-specific applications that are forced upon me. This should be fun.