I just repaved my desktop and while reloading software I thought I’d share some of the programs I use the most. Here they are in no particular order:

SQL Server

This is the software that pays the bills. I’ll admit though, I’m pretty excited about working with SQL Server. Databases are fun!

Visual Studio

Along with SQL Server, I do a little bit of .NET development. I’ve also been using the Database Edition features quite a bit lately, and really like them.

Digsby

Digsby is the best multi-IM client. One app to connect to Google Talk (my preferred network), Live (MSN),  Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, and more!

Input Director

Input Director let’s me use one keyboard and mouse to control both my desktop and my laptop.

KatMouse

I can’t live without KatMouse anymore. It lets you use your scroll wheel in background windows without bringing them to the front or giving them focus.

Microsoft Office

Not much to say here. I use Word, Excel, and OneNote the most, then PowerPoint and Visio. I try to avoid Outlook.

Google Chrome

Chrome is getting more use lately. Simple and quick, I love the application shortcuts for gmail.

Firefox

Still my most used web browser. I love some of the extensions, but it’s been losing a little bit of time to Google Chrome. I’m currently running beta 2 of Firefox 3.1.

Foxit Reader

Foxit Reader is a lightweight pdf reader. It’s much faster than Adobe. I don’t like that they started adding a bunch of stuff to their installer or the new updater, but I still keep it around. It’s getting a little less important with Google’s new pdf viewer built in to gmail.

Daemon Tools

Simple tool, mounts iso images.

Skype

I use Skype to call regular phones, hardly ever for Skype-to-Skype calls.

UltraMon

UltraMon is a must have for multi-monitor users. It extends the Windows taskbar across your other monitors. Other cool things are being able to setup different wallpaper and screen savers on each monitor.

Alt.Binz

My favorite Usenet client for binaries.

uTorrent

Favorite bittorrent client.

WinRAR

WinRAR is one of those things that I take for granted. Right drag –> Extract To is mostly how I use it, and occasionally to zip something for email.

XBMC

I don’t use this on my PC, but it would be hard to get along without it. My wife loves this one as well. XBMC is by far the best media center software I’ve used. Newer HD formats are making my original Xbox outdated, but I’m going to get some new hardware soon and definitely keep XBMC around.

Airfoil

Airfoil let’s you stream music from any application to AirPort Express devices. I picked up a few on ebay for around $50 each. Turn on Pandora and have whole house audio on the cheap.

OpenPandora

Pandora in a Windows desktop app. Lets you hide it in the tray and more.

TweetDeck

My favorite Twitter client.

That covers most of it. I also have a bunch of small apps that I keep in a C:\utils folder and there are a few web apps that I use frequently (Google Apps, FreshBooks, Google Reader, RTM). I’ll cover those in a future post.

What apps do you use frequently? Any I should know about?

This has been bugging me for months. At some point, Google Chrome just stopped working. I would double click the icon, and nothing would happen. The process would show up in task manager, but nothing would show up on the screen. I spent HOURS searching for an answer and finally gave up. Chrome was working fine on my laptop, so I just figured something got corrupted. I have been wanting to rebuild my desktop to fix the problem, but just haven’t had time.

Today, I went to launch Chrome on my laptop and nothing! I was freaking out! Not again!!! The last thing I wanted to do was rebuild my laptop. I decided to try searching again. Since it happened on both of my systems, I figured that someone else must have had the same problem. Finally, I found the answer!

Apparently, the reason Chrome wouldn’t start has something to do with DRM in Vista. I use a great program called Airfoil that lets me stream audio to several Apple Airport Express devices in my house. Airfoil has a feature called “instant hijack” that lets you re-route the audio from an app without restarting it. Apparently if that is turned on, Vista thinks you are trying to be evil. Anyway, as soon as I disabled the instant hijack Chrome started working again. Thank you, Mark, for posting the answer!

I really hate DRM!!!