Ken Blake, MVP formulated the question :
If you say so, I believe you. You don't say what the programs are, but yours
is a very unusual situation. There certainly are occasional such programs,
but comparatively very few, and in the great majority of cases, they are are
very small programs.
My statement "if Windows is reinstalled, all the programs need to be too" was
an oversimplification, made for the sake of keeping things simple and easy to
understand. Yes, it's not literally *all*. But for the enormous majority of
Windows users, it's close enough to all that the exceptions don't matter.
Ugh! "Refreshing your Windows installations "every month or so" is itself a
giant waste of time, as far as I'm concerned. Windows doesn not need to be
reinstalled periodically.
it does need to be done if you continually try out a lot of stuff, be
it software or hardware
and who is talking about windows installations?
I also try out a lot of non-MS operating systems
and yes, I know you could use VMware or virtualPC for this but then I
still wouldn't know if the OS is recognizing all of my hardware
the programs I am able to use without reinstalling are:
open office so I can open any document without the need for installing
MSoffice
several CAD programs (A9tech, BCad, CADstd, freeCAD, LasiCAD,...)
a lot of picture handling programs (Irfan, Photofiltre,
PowerDraw,imgThumb, ASSCII Pic, TifSplitter, Iphile, Picasa,...)
a number of multimedia clients (VLC, Audacity, FSplayer, XMplay,
Screamer radio, BSplayer, Zortam, mPlayer, WorldTV, AVIpreview,...)
a few file managers (A43, TotalCommander, CubicExplorer, LupasRen,
Bruno, XYplorer)
editors of all sort (Notepad++, Winmerge, XMLFox, Shalom, PsPAd,
WinVI32, Scite, Witched, Reshack, NVU, Alleycode, Amaya, Foxit, Uedit,
Dasm,... )
a variety of network tools (Dameware, Foundstone, Sysinternals
utilities, UltraVNC, Lantool, Radtool, Putty, Kiwi,...)
a heap of debug and enumeration tools for hardware and software
(APImonitor, dependency walker, dissasembler, ListWnd, Aida, ...)
misc tools like
Micro20 to be able to write CD's on any writer,
Convert so I don't have to remember how many liters there are in a
gallon or how many pounds to a stone or whatever
Jamsoft treesize to be able to pinpoint an out of order logdirectory in
a matter of seconds,
WinRAR to open almost all of the well known existing archive formats
KeePass so I don't need to remember or write down any password
Portable Firefox with my bookmarks to start up on any computer or
OffByone for a quick check or Gecko if I want to see if pages are
following W3C standard
SmartFTPclient holding all ftp sites I use regularly
RSSOwl so I stay up to date on world news whenever I have the time
MesNews so I can keep an eye on this and other newsgroups ^^
Trillian to check up on my buddies whenever and where ever I happen to
be
uTorrent so I can abuse bandwidth on the spot :')
these are just the tools I use regularly
and they are all indeed pretty small but I hate bloatware anyway
I'd rather use a lot of tiny tools that do exactly what I need without
a lot of features
they can all be put on a USB flash disk so I can use these tools where
ever I have to go
and then I am not even including all of the bootable solutions I have
they all have yet another set of tools that can be used without
installing anything on the host computer
then onward to games
Quake3 and Quake4, Doom3, Need for Speed, FEAR, GRAW, SOF, UT2004,
Serious Sam, ShadowOps, Wolfenstein, Urban Assault, MAME32, Spirit
Warrior, Flightgear, Forsaken, Addiction Pinball,
and about a 300 smaller games ranging from chess to mahjong or jigsaw
puzzles, arcade and so on
could be that I am forgetting a lot here, the collection has grown over
the years and propably has a lot of stuff I don't use anymore
grtz