Configuring a new Windows Machine

Today I learnt a new way to configure a new Windows machine: with a PowerShell package manager. A bit like like YUM for Windows! All thanks to https://chocolatey.org/. As a side-note, this package manager, although currently third-party, will be built into Windows itself fairly soon, via One-Get in Powershell v5.

This assumes you have Powershell >= 3 installed already.

Into a cmd Window:
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin

And into a PowerShell Window, some useful stuff:
cinst notepadplusplus.install
cinst Firefox
cinst GoogleChrome
cinst 7zip
cinst flashplayeractivex
cinst flashplayerplugin
cinst putty
cinst sysinternalscinst 
cinst procexp

cinst sublimetext2
cinst curl
cinst Wget
cinst winmerge
cinst wireshark

Remove Windows 8 Default CrApps:

And a bonus Windows 8 tidbit that I made up on my very own: how to remove a lot of crappy apps shipped by default with Windows 8.1 (and maybe in 8.0) in PowerShell:

$CrappyApps = @("Microsoft.BingFinance ","Microsoft.BingFoodAndDrink",`
"Microsoft.BingHealthAndFitness","Microsoft.BingMaps",`
"Microsoft.BingNews","Microsoft.BingSports","Microsoft.BingTravel",`
"Microsoft.BingWeather","Microsoft.HelpAndTips",`
"microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps","Microsoft.WindowsReadingList",`
"Microsoft.XboxLIVEGames","Microsoft.ZuneMusic","Microsoft.ZuneVideo",`
"CheckPoint.VPN","f5.vpn.client","JuniperNetworks.JunosPulseVpn","Microsoft.MoCamera","SonicWALL.MobileConnect")
 
$CrappyApps | % { Get-AppxPackage -Name $_ | Remove-AppxPackage 2>&1 | Out-Null }

Note, the above few commands haven't been run in production - I ran each Get|Remove command individually on my own machine, and then arrayified it all for this post, so there may be an error lurking in there.