A couple of weeks ago, I decided to reinstall windows on my work laptop. The primary reason for this was that I was moving on to a new project, and I had been experimenting with a few different approaches with my setup, so I figured a clean start would not hurt. Further more, I had to get the mammoth RSA off my machine! I was not convinced a simple uninstall would do it, so figured I would just nuke it.

Now this post is mostly documentation of how I performed my reinstall and all the steps I needed to take to get my machine up and running just the way I like it. Though I do hope this helps some of you out there.

My machine is the run-of-the-mill Dell Latitude D820. I just slipped in the OEM supplied Windows CD and let her rip. Complete with the full format option and everything. To be honest, it felt good. A nice, clean slate to start working with. Of course, I backed my documents folder prior to doing this. If you are here, don’t forget this step, its kinda important

Once this is done, is when the fun begins. First step, set up appropriate accounts, privileges and passwords. In my case, it was only me, so it did not matter that much.

Now, to set up my home directory. Most windows users default to the “C:\Documents and Settings\…” option, but in my case, I prefer to spend a lot of time at the command prompt. After a while, its get tedious to navigate around with all those double quotes. So I took up Lifehackers advice [Scroll down the page to the section named “A word about Windows’ default home directory“] on the issue and created a “C:\home\raju” directory. Go ahead, read that section, I will wait.

Done? Good. Do keep in mind that moving your “My Documents” folder will not prevent programs like Eclipse and NetBeans from creating application specific directories in “C:\Documents and Settings\…”. This is the only downside of this arrangement, but I have lived with it so far

Now, the following step is crucial if you use Emacs and/or Cygwin. These tools look for a “HOME” environment variable. You want to set up right off the bat. Right Click on “My Computer” -> Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environment Variables. Under the “System Variables” section, hit the “New”. In the dialog box that shows up, put “HOME” (all caps, without the quotes) and put the value as the path to your newly created home directory (in my case its C:\home\raju). Hit Ok to close that dialog, and then hit Ok twice to close the remaining dialog. There is another way to get to the System Properties dialog. Just press the Windows key on your keyboard (right next to the left Alt key) and Pause/Break key simultaneously. There, done and out of the way.

Having done that, I went ahead and created three more directories under the root note, namely developer, projects and utils. The developer directory is mainly for storing development tools that I use, the projects is for any and all projects that I am working on, and the utils directory is for utility tools that I use for maintenance, backup, ftp’ing etc. I will cover the tools shortly. There is some ambiguity sometimes as to whether a particular tool is for developer or utils, for e.g. Cygwin. Just flip a coin to break the tie, it doesn’t really matter.

Now, all the tools that I installed. Its quite a list, and it changes all the time. I constantly move from one tool to another for the same purpose all the time, so this list may not prove to be accurate a few months from now, but this is as it exists right now. I am breaking up based on which directory they are installed in (developer or utils).

I do allow most Microsoft programs (like Office) to install themselves in “Program Files” but thats the only exception (except those that don’t allow you to change their installation directory, which are far and few between).

That’s all for this time. I will detail my Firefox installation and several others soon.

Anyone out there have any ideas/suggestions? Feel free to drop a comment.