Picking back up on the saga of rebuilding my Tablet PC, I have installed the operating system from the Recovery disk supplied by Toshiba, updated Windows XP to Service Pack 2, and installed critical security utilities to prevent virus and spyware infection. The next stepwas to install the applications and productivity utilities I use every day. As I said in the first post in this diary, one of the benfits of doing a complete overhaul on the system is to get rid of the software and detritus left by testing a large number of applications and utilities.

So my initial build-out includes only those tools that I use on a regular basis. I'm involved in three princpal activities in my work - web design and production, writing, and communicating about my company's products and activities. Then, of course, there's my "other job" - writing and maintaining four blogs, two book projects, and research for my weekly radio show.

The core of my toolkit is, as you might expect, Microsoft Office 2003. So that is the very first thing I installed on my shiny new OS. I did a Complete Install of Office which places all of the installation files on my hard drive. Yes, it takes up a significant amount of room but it reduces the hassles of having to insert my Office CD when I do updates. Hard disk space is cheap these days and the M205 has a 60 GB drive, so I have the room to spare.

Once Office is installed, the very first thing to do is run Office Update to add the recent Service Pack 1 updates for the suite's applications. I also am a regular user of Visio, which is not part of the Office 2003 Professional Edition installation but, like OneNote (which came preinstalled as part of the Toshiba configuration), is a part of the Office family so that goes onto the system next, followed by its SP1 update.

An interesting side note: the Visio SP1 update tripped my antivirus software so I had to disable it temporarily to perform the update. Why Microsoft would build an updater that uses virus-like behavior is a mystery to me.

As regular readers know, I am an all-day Outlook user so the very next thing to be done is to install the add-ins that make Outlook into my dashboard application. I have tested and evaluated nearly one hundred add-ins for Outlook, but there are three that I can not live without:

• Lookout - the essential search tool for Outlook, recently acquired by Microsoft and now available as a free download.

• NewsGator - the RSS aggregator for Outlook that allows me to get all of my RSS subscriptions in the Outlook environment as well as from the web using their optional Nesgator Online Services. As a NGOS subscriber, I can construct custom feeds based on keywords and get premium content not otherwise available (like my daily Foxtrot and Doonesbury comic strips).

• Tablet Enhancements for Outlook - Einstein Technologies' brilliant add-in that allows me to create tasks, events, contacts, and Journal entries with ink.The new version 2.0 is optimized for the latest Tablet PC operating system and has the way-cool ability to let me work normally in Outlook when in landscape mode (when I'm using the Tablet as a laptop) and provide all of the ink capabilities when in Portrait mode.

Next come my other core applications:

• Visual SourceSafe - web content management

• Macromedia Studio MX - Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash

• Adobe Publishing Collection - Photoshop, Acrobat Professional, Illustrator, and PageMaker.

• Agilix GoBinder - the Tablet PC planner and information organizer

• Mindjet MindManager - my essential for brainstorming and idea management

• Gyronix Result Manager - a MindManager add-in for managing my Getting Things Done workflow using brilliant mind maps called Dashboard maps

• SecureCRT and SecureFX - my company's secure remote access and file transfer clients

• ClickTracks - web analytics that show exactly how visitors use my company's web site

• Techhsmith SnagIt and Camtasia - screen capture and recording tools for illustrating web sites, blog posts, and documents, and developing animated tutorials with sound

• Skype - call anyone, anywhere for free using the internet

Before I installed each of these applications, I made sure that a proper System Restore point had been created. Most modern installers do this properly but it is critical to have the ability to roll back if an installation goes badly. I test each application to make sure it launches properly and build, print, and save a test file before installing the next application. While preparing for the system overhaul, I had already collected all of the application updates I needed so those were installed along with each application.

OK, I'm nearly finished. All that remains is installing my utility programs, restoring my data from backup, and making a Ghost image of the entire system for fast and easy restoration in the future. I'll cover that in the next (and final) post in this diary.