I’ve been a Mac user for well over 10 years but lately I have been using a small Windows 10 GPD Pocket 2 when out on the road as it is small enough to carry and powerful enough to carry out a reasonable amount of tasks.
I’m a little finicky about my OSX setup and although it has taken me a little while I am now in a place where I have a pretty defined Windows 10 setup which a couple of colleagues have been pressing me to share, so here goes:
- Post Windows 10 install, if it is Windows Home upgrade to Windows Pro
- Download the Windows 10 Update Assistant and update to the latest version of Windows 10
- Windows Pro is needed so BitLocker can be turned on for hard drive encryption. Proceed to do that.
- Install your favourite Anti-Virus. I tend to stick with Windows Defender.
- Install Malwarebytes cybersecurity for windows 10.
- Download BlackBird, backup existing settings, and run for enhanced Windows 10 Privacy
- Download Windows Firewall Control (a little like Little Snitch for Mac) which blocks outbound App and System requests until you. validate request.
- Install Percentage, a cool freeware app that puts the percentage on the windows taskbar.
- Install XMeters a cool utility that provides Windows 10 taskbar system monitoring (a little like MenuMeters for Mac)
- Download the Win10Widgets Rainmeter theme which comes with Rainmeter pre-packaged.
- Install Tor for private browsing and Firefox for an alternative to Edge.
- Install your chosen VPN
- Install Ditto (Windows Clipboard stacking)
- Install Flantter for multi-account Twitter
- Install YHN for Hacker News
- Install AdBoards For Trello
- Install IAWriter for Focused writing
- Install Libre Office for Office docs compatibility
- Install Keep Lite for easy access to Google Keep Notes
- Install Franz and map Slack, WhatsApp and Skype
- Install Sumatra PDF for quick PDF viewing
- Install Storyvoid for Instapaper articles
- Enable Windows Subsystem for Linux
- Add Ubuntu image for WSL
- Install Storage Made Easy Windows Apps – mapped drive and apps into Multi-Cloud data
All done !