Installing a new PC

I received a new laptop at work the other day. So begins the cycle again of having to tweak every little thing to the way I like it. I’m a tinkerer and I love to play around in settings and customization screens. Heck, I’ll even hop in regedit willingly to get the specific behaviour I want.

But I never properly document all the steps I take to get there. I do a lot of tweaking in my IDE’s and I thank all heavens that in recent years these settings can be saved to your account, so that I don’t have to painstakingly redo every little thing.

Installing programs is easier. I always fall back to Ninite to install the stuff I need. But lately, I have a lot more tools than Ninite provides. Sure, it’s still a great tool, and it provides an easy and quick way to get you up and started. But what about Brave, my browser of choice? It’s not even an option. What about Lightshot, Ditto, Obsidian or any of the other custom tools?

So this time around, I tried installing everything with Chocolatey¹. It’s a public repository, with packages provided by the community, which has its own risks, but on the whole community-driven tools haven’t led me astray so far (you can tell I wasn’t hit by the XZ backdoor).

I found everything I needed and installed everything through Chocolatey. So now when I need to set up a new PC, I just have to run this handy little command:

choco list -lo -r -y | % { "choco install $($_.SubString(0, $_.IndexOf("|"))) -y" }

And I get a list of install commands to run on my new machine. Finally free of all the manual hassle!

Cool, now I just want to get rid of all the Windows bloatware crap. I used the Win Debloat Tools by Plínio Larrubia. Highly effective, highly recommend. With just one click of a button all the useless crap like Weather apps and MSN News are gone. Just barebones OS, thank you.

There’s a couple of things I still had to do manually, like installing the Jetbrains Mono font, setting up Ditto, Lightshot and Cmder with the settings I like.

Overall I think this experience is still better than what I did before. I’m curious to hearing how any of you tackle this problem. Get in touch!