(If you are looking for first-class IT support in London, please feel free to contact us)

We carry around a lot of software on our USB keys these days in order to assist in doing our job. Here is the main selection of the software we keep on it.

Installations for New PC's

Standard to all

• PDF Viewer - Adobe Reader - Standard PDF Reader (or the faster Foxit PDF Reader)
• PDF Writer - PDFCreator - easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer.
• Zip - built in since XP (or 7-Zip - Supports ZIP,RAR and many others and it's own 7z format is hard to beat.)
• Antivirus -NOD32 - The only antivirus we recommend. (there is also the FOSS ClamWin Antivirus - doesn't provide on access realtime scanning)
• Internet search - Google Desktop - easy access to information on your computer and from the web.
• Diagnosis/Support  - RunPCRun Total Support - Handy to have our support package!
• In place for repair work
  
• Malware - HijackThis and Ad-aware
• Drive imager - DriveImage XML or Acronis True Image
• Background
• .NET Framework  - allows end-users to run .NET applications.
• Java Runtime Environment - allows end-users to run Java applications.
• De-crap "Home" PC's - PC Decrapifier
  

Enables the use of docx and other 2007 formats in older Microsoft Office versions.
Users of the Microsoft Office XP and 2003 programs Word, Excel, or PowerPoint—please install all High-Priority updates from Microsoft Update before downloading the Compatibility Pack.

Two very interesting things brought to my attention of late.

First we have nLite and vLite , which looks to be very nice Windows deployment/unattended setup tools, compared to the standard Microsoft Unattended setup tool for XP - I've not looked at the Microsoft's own Vista deployment tool yet so I can't comment on how good/bad it is.
As an aside, I have to say that at RunPCRun it is rare to install/reinstall Windows. Installing isn't necessary as we don't produce hardware and it's well known that OEM's pre-install Windows for you. Secondly reinstalling Windows is fairly rare as there is almost always a fix that will bring a dead system back to life. Only in cases such as a total hard drive failure, in which case if it's in the warranty period the manufacturer will replace the drive and then the data is restored from backup. If it's not under warranty then it's usually a good reason to upgrade that old PC rather than spend good money on labour on an old machine.

I have seen reinstalling Windows to be used as a fix for almost any situation by people and comapanies. In my eyes it's a crazy thing to do for no other reason than "I don't know how to fix it"

Secondly we have DriverPacks.net where some very nice person has spent a lot of time amalgamating all the drivers for a particular peripheral together all in one folder. This will be very useful to have on the network or on a USB key (especially the SATA and Network drivers) in order to change those yellow plings/bangs in the Device Manager to nicely installed devices.

Also you could combine nLite and DriverPacks together and you have a very nice Windows installation CD.

• Scribus - Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
• Banshee - Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee's simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.
• BRL-CAD -  The BRL-CAD package is a powerful Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system with over 20 years development and production use by the U.S. military. BRL-CAD includes an interactive geometry editor, parallel ray-tracing support for rendering and geometric analysis, path-tracing for realistic image synthesis, network distributed framebuffer support, image-processing and signal-processing tools.
• Seamonkey - Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application.
• Sci-craft -  SciCraft is a powerful open source data analysis software with an easy-to-use graphical user interface.
• KompoZer -   KompoZer is a wysiwyg HTML editor (an Nvu/Composer fork) aimed towards advanced users.
• GIMPshop - The GIMP (a photoshop-like image manipulation package) reworked to look and feel like Photoshop.

• Private character editor - eudcedit.exe
• IExpress Wizard - iexpress.exe
• Object Packager - packager.exe
• Network shared folder wizard - shrpubw.exe
• File signature verification tool - sigverif.exe
• Driver Verifier Manager - verifier.exe
• Encryption tool – Cipher.exe
• Event triggers – Eventtriggers.exe
• Messaging – Msg.exe

• Dr Watson - drwtsn32.exe
• DirectX diagnosis - dxdiag.exe
• File signature verification tool - sigverif.exe
• System File Checker - sfc.exe
• System Monitor - perfmon.exe
• Find strings – Findstr.exe
• System configuration utility - msconfig.exe
  

A bunch of utilities on a USB flash drive lovingly compiled and brought to our attention by Tim Fehlman at a Daily Cup of Tech. The poor fella got his website hit pretty badly for a while for hosting this so check it out now the buzz has died down. Thanks Tim, I will be looking there for some inspiration for our own IT Support Engineers Toolkit that we use for our daily support tasks as well as small programs for inclusion in our runPCrun Total Support Package.