I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Windows. In fact, I quite like it. I could happily use Linux if it could run Photoshop with any proficiency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a relative I could sell in order to buy one, but despite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warnings have been disabled within an inch of their lives, the Windows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a useful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watching Windows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Windows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graphics driver and the webcam only showing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceiling? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Windows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my computer and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awesome Edition to Windows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Professionals Edition, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incidentally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying, I love Ninite. The first thing I normally do after a reinstall is open Internet Explorer and use that to download Firefox. Once Firefox is sorted, I then start the three-day-long process of working out what it is I actually use, remembering only when I go to use a program that I still need to download and install it. Ninite takes out the guesswork. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis – including Firefox, Thunderbird, Notepad++, Spotify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and WinSCP – and I can download a custom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only software I need to manually install are the biggies – Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assuming that those drivers are available before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Ninite – you have made the past two weeks infinitely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pumpkin above must go to our next door neighbours. Sadly, I cannot take any credit for those artistically swirly eyes or the way our stairwell suddenly smells a lot like rotting veg. You don’t know how tempted I am to take the lid off and put the hamster inside, just having him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)