It’s a bit of a painful experience to upgrade a Windows developer machine to a new one, with 20-30 tools in regular use, each one has it’s own export and import procedure and special dance that needs to be carried out to migrate settings.
Software I Use – Development
Here’s the things that I miss before day 1 is out:
Chrome – Of course. Sign in as user and reset colour scheme. Thanks for the help IE!
WAMP Server (get old vhosts from old PC!). Also need Visual C++ Redistributable before PHP will boot.
PHPStorm (get old config from old PC!)
Notepad++ – I use this only as a scratchpad, little documents like Post-Its.
Node/NPM
Composer
ConsoleZ – Nice replacement for crusty old windows command line
HeidiSQL – This is my MySQL admin panel of choice. Also lets you export/import server settings.
WinSCP – Secure FTP tool of choice. Don’t forget to export server configs.
Git for Windows
TortoiseGit – Git front-end
7Zip/WinRar
Comfort Software
Spotify
Everything – Best windows filesearch tool. Maintains an active index for instant searching without terrible filesystem overhead.
HostsFileEditor – Windows tool to easily edit the hosts file
Mouse Without Borders – allows seamless control of multiple PCs with one mouse and keyboard. Software based KVM basically.
Toggl – Every moment of every day gets billed to *something*, even if it’s not billable, like ‘write proposal’ or ‘set up new machine’. Toggl is great for this. Collecting this data is invaluable when taking a birds eye view of your business.
DropBox – Of course.
WinMerge – Handy for comparing and merging tricky things, like config files.
Other important tidbits
Grab old SSH keys and delete from old PC.
Once WAMP is up and running and serving an old vhosted website, time to get xdebug up and running again. Visit xdebug website and paste in phpinfo() output for a DLL to download. Place the DLL in place and set the following in php.ini:
`xdebug.remote_enable = 1`
Good to go.
Upgrading from a windows 10 PC to another came with my colour scheme set, wallpaper installed, and Office pre-set to my licensed accounts. Little things like that make me feel like Windows “gets out of the way” more than it used to.
I’ll tackle Adobe Creative Cloud at some stage. Given it’s Adobe, I’m expecting the usual shitfight.
Back to work!
