Get your Windows 8 up to speed fast

With the release of Windows 8 on MSDN yesterday, I have a gut feeling that today, around the globe, people are installing this fresh operating system on their machine. I’ve done so too and I wanted to share with your two tools: one that helped me get up to speed fast, one that will help me up to speed even faster the next time I want to reset my PC.

Chocolatey

One of the best things created for Windows, ever, is Chocolatey. If you are familiar with Ninite, you will find that both serve the same purpose, however Chocolatey is more developer focused.

Chocolatey provides a catalog of software packages like Notepad++, ReSharper, Paint.Net and a whole lot more. After installing Chocolatey, all you have to do to install such a package is invoke, from the command line, “cinst <package>”. The keyword command line is pretty important: what if you could just create a batch file containing all packages you need, like I did here?

Batch files are great, but even easier is creating a custom Chocolatey feed on www.myget.org (create a feed, go to package sources, add Chocolatey): you can simply add whatever you need on a fresh system to this feed and whenever you want to install every package from your custom feed, like I did yesterday evening, you invoke

cinst All -source "http://www.myget.org/F/chocolateymaarten"

and go to bed. In the morning, everything is on your PC.

Windows 8 - Reset Your PC

There’s a new feature in Windows 8 called “Refresh/reset Your PC”. What it does is revert to a certain baseline whenever you feel the need of a format C: coming up. This baseline, by default, is a fresh install. Now what if you could just set your own baseline and revert back to that one next time you need a reinstall? The good news: you can do this!

• Configure your PC at will
• From an elevated command prompt, issue:
  mkdir C:\SoFreshThatItSmellsGreat
  recimg -CreateImage C:\SoFreshThatItSmellsGreat

Done!

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