Keeping track of opensource/freeweare/plugins/etc

Question

Howdy. I'm a converting mainframe programmer with less than a year of PC programming experience (same company) with VS 2K5. I'm digging the new 'freedom' to try new tools on my PC and have become maybe what you'd call a utility packrat. I have all sorts of open source utilities, freeware utilities, VS plugins/add-ins/snippet collections and the like. What I don't have is a good system for ensuring I give each one a proper evaluation an making sure I only keep the good and throw out the bad.

To be sure there are a handful if items that have worked their way into daily/weekly use - but for the most part I'll come across an older (couple of months?) downloaded installer and just wonder "WTF did I download this for" and never get around to checking it out.

Surely I can't be the only one who grabs something from a link posted in forums(like this one) and makes a mental note to 'check it out later" but "later" never comes.

Anyone got any good suggestions for how to manage a stable of not-necessarily-related utilities and how to keep track of what works, what doesn't, and why?

Answer 1

To try out new tools / utilities you could create a virtual machine as a sandbox area. If you create a copy of the base installation then you can easily 'reset' the machine and install more apps.

I would also recommend creating a disk image of your basic windows environment with AV, Office, Firefox and other apps all installed so that you can easily revert your actual machine back to a clean install. If you create a seperate partition or have another HD to store data like My Docs, Software etc then wiping your machine no longer becomes a nightmare.

As for links i want to return to, i've created a temp bookmark folder on by toolbar where i drag and drop links i want to return to but not necessarily bookmark. You could also make use of FF3 tagging for bookmarks and create a new "temp" tag.

Answer 2

I use the delicious.com bookmarking service. I tag the stuff I want to consider for later with a "review" tag, and every so often go back and pull that list to look for stuff that's relevant to my current project. It works really well for me, since the list is available to me on any computer I have, so I can leverage idle time anywhere I have a machine around.

Answer 3

I don't have a good suggestion, but something that works for me.

I keep an online to-do list on my iGoogle homepage, links for "later research" go there. Sadly though that list it at almost 100 items.

I'm thinking about building a specialized to-do list website to store this type of thing....just not enough time.

Answer 4

Well, there's always the "Add/remove programs" in the control panel. It'll even sort (though not very accurate) your programs by how often you use them.

It's at least a list of some of the programs you've installed. (Although a lot of freeware doesn't register in the program list.)

Answer 5

This is an original proposal:

You can use twitter to bookmark your link (even faster use Rebtweeter Link to command http://rebtweeter.com which automatically extract title from the link and post it to twitter with the link )

And you can then use Twitter Tools a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives all your tweets daily and weekly ( see http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ )

Answer 6

For not-necessarily-related utilities, try FileHippo, they have a large organized collection of freeware/shareware programs, utilities, drivers etc. Since they are updating very fast (and have a RSS feed of latest updates), they are saving a lot of my time.