In my last post, I wrote about putting Windows XP on my MacBook Pro Bootcamp partition. After that, I had to install some software and get it running!

My XP partition isn’t going to be a full step-up. I am mostly going to run virtual machine images for our demos, and maybe do a bit of coding on the side. So here’s a list of what I put on the machine, and how I did it.

The most important thing I wanted to do was to set it up in a safe manner. As Jeff Atwood points out, the single biggest issue with Windows security is running as an Adminstrator. On my desktop, I run as an Admin, and I’m too far gone in terms of switching back to a regular user. But on the laptop, I wanted to see if I could run only as a regular user.

First I created two users, “jim” and “root”. “Root” is an admin account, and “jim” is my day to day account. I needed the admin account so that I could install the .NET 2.0 framework before installing the next piece.

The most critical piece was installing Sudowin, a sudo clone for Windows. This allows you to run certain programs (or all programs, if configured that way) as an Administrator, without being an admin. In the Sudowin About page, there is a long discussion why this is a different, and better, solution to running with elevated privileges than the native “Run as ..” or Vista UACs. This install allowed me to install the remainder of my software while still running in my local account. It also has a command-line “sudo” tool.

The remaining software that I installed was

• Microsoft Virtual PC and VMWare VM Player — for our demos,
• A text editor (I’m switching between Textpad and Activestate’s Komodo Edit) — for simple text editing,
• 7-Zip — free zip/unzip,
• Perl — needed for day-to-day scripting,
• CutePDF — for printing to PDFs,
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, and NUnit, FxCop, and Reflector — for when I want to actually write code,
• Firefox,
• Microsoft PowerToys for XP– to tweak the UI the way I like it,
• Sharp Keys — to tweak the keyboard the way I like it,
• Sysinternals Process Explorer — to see what’s running,
• Winpatrol — to keep tabs on anything that might get surreptitiously installed or run,
• PuTTY — to SSH into the VM Ware Linux images.

So far, so good. I’ve been really impressed with my laptop as a Windows box, and more so with running the VPC and VM images for our demos. See you at VS Live!

– Jim