These are the common steps I use to setup a new machine and my favorite tools.
Create recovery CDs if not available
Remove [Norton] if pre-installed
Enable Remote Desktop access
[Firefox] – Be sure to get these add-ons: [Foxmarks] (bookmark synchronizer), [FireFTP] (ftp client), [ChatZilla] (icq client), and [Firebug] (web debugger)
[Thunderbird] – open source email client, [manually backup] or use [Mozbackup] to backup/restore Mozilla products
[Lightning] – integrated calendar for Mozilla Thunderbird
[TortoiseSvn] – an open source client tool for integrating with subversion source control
[WinMerge] – an open source diff tool excellent for quickly identifying revision changes and merging code quickly
[Cygwin] – UNIX command-line tools on Windows (grep, tar, tail, head, zip, unzip, ssh, scp)
[Textpad] – a text editing utility with built-in regular expression support
[Gimp] – a free image manipulation program
[WinRar] – there’s always some hoodlum in the online community using the rar format that contains a file that you need
[Skype] – online chat/voice communication
[MagicDisc] – allows you to mount ISO files on 32/64 bit Windows
[VMWare Player] – free virtual machine player
[Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008] – Microsoft development tools for doing anything .NET
Visual Studio 2005 Express Service Pack [xp] [vista] – Various bug fixes that fix known problems in Visual Studio
[Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Service Pack] – fixes numerous bugs in the Team System edition of Visual Studio
[Visual Studio 2008 SP1] – ISO service pack
[Windows Platform SDK] – A development kit of tools, libraries, and source for developing on the Windows platform
[DirectX SDK] – the software development tools, includes and libraries for building DirectX applications [Setup.exe]
[Google C++ Style Guide] – coding standards attempt to keep programmers’ code easy to read and hopefully easy to understand
[Microsoft XNA Game Studio] – all the dependencies that you need to start developing for the XBox
[Quicktime] – for very basic video editing
[ITunes] – to synchronize with my IPod
[Sharepod] – a better way to manage music on your ipod
[Wireshark] – network packet level analysis
[Combined Community Codec Pack] – contains most of the codecs you need to play movies from the net
[Visual Assist] – the best enhancement for Visual Studio Professional or better that you can buy
[BitTorrent] – Popular download and distribution client