Here’s How I Set Up My Laptop

I’ve been using an HP Pavilion 14" x360 for the past 4 years now and while it isn’t the greatest laptop, it works well enough. Here’s how I’ve set it up as well as what software I use. I’ve had this post for a while now, but I’ve decided to rewrite it.

Installation

Useful Tips For Those With Shitty Laptops: This might be relevant if you have a shitty cheap laptop. One reason cheap laptops are so cheap is that they’re full of sponsored crapware which can make a computer slow and annoying to use. To get rid of this, you’d want to install Windows from a flash drive, ideally by downloading the Windows 11 ISO and burning it using Rufus.

1. Before running the initial setup, I press Shift + F10 to bring up a terminal then I enter in OOBE\BYPASSNRO so I can set up Windows without a Microsoft Account because I refuse to be forced to use a Microsoft account.
2. Run updates and rename the PC
3. Configure WSL with Ubuntu.
4. Setup Windows Hello for Passkeys and certain password managers work on Windows.
5. Rename the PC. No reason for this except for my computer’s Bonjour name.
6. Enable the Clipboard Manager (Win+V)
7. Configure the following settings in File Explorer:
   • Show File Extensions—Explorer>Folder Options>View>Advanced Settings>(Uncheck)Hide Extensions for known file types.
   • Showing dot drives—Explorer>Folder Options>View>Advanced Settings>Show hidden files, folders, and drives.

Entertainment

• VLC Media Player to play media? Also to take screenshots.
• Steam for games from Steam.
• Epic Games for games from Epic Games.

Productivity

• Google Drive for syncing documents, mostly for work.
• Dropbox just for writing articles that I contribute elsewhere.
• Firefox is what I use for web browsing because Microsoft Edge became so annoying. I use it with the following extensions:
  • Bitwarden my password manager.
  • uBlock Origin for blocking ads. Given Manifest v3 which affect how ad blockers work, it only works in Firefox.
  • Enhancer for YouTube makes YouTube more usable.
• Google Chrome not my main browser, but I use it for web apps. Not that they aren’t supported in Firefox―it’s just Chromium browsers support site-specific browsers so each web app behaves as a standalone desktop application which I can then pin on my taskbar. Shallow reason, but it looks nicer than a desktop bookmark. The apps I use are:
  • Squoosh to compress images quickly and convert them to various formats.
  • PhotoPea is an online image editor. I haven’t really used it, but it’s handy in case you can’t download an image editor for whatever reason.
  • SVGOM is for SVG optimization that uses the tool SVGO.
• Microsoft Office for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. I only use it because my mom pays for the subscription and for work. Otherwise, I’d like to shift to LibreOffice which I’ve installed but don’t use.
  • Merge Many to One Extension by Graham Mayor which comes in handy when using mail merge for statements. It’s been having problems recently however.
• Sumatra PDF to quickly view PDFs. Browsers work just fine, but I don’t want the overhead.
• Thunderbird for emails.
• WhatsApp Desktop for work communications. I use the web version for personal use.
• Zoom for video conferencing. I prefer Google Meet

Utilities

• NAPS2 is a useful scanning application which lets you save scans as images and PDFs. It also lets you do some basic editing on the scans.
• WinAero Tweaker to make Windows less annoying. I use this to disable the garbage context menu.
• Notepad++ for quick text editing.
• ShareX for screenshots. Window’s Snipping Tool isn’t too bad (it can even extract text!) but in typical Microsoft fasion, they make it difficult to use anything else.
• Some Apple applications. They suck but I need them to work with my iThings:
  • iCloud for syncing images and files.
  • Apple Music to play music
  • Apple Devices to sync with my Apple devices It sucks though. I use CopyTrans now because this application is useless.
• CopyTrans I tried to use Apple devices but it’s trash so I’m using this instead. I like that it doesn’t ask you to replace the iPhone driver anymore.
• Everything lets you search for files on Windows much faster than Window’s native search. Doesn’t search file contents (which is why Windows Search is slow) however.
• qBittorrent to download files through torrents. Note that I discourage you from using it to commit copyright infringement by using the Jackett Search Plugin to search for media without looking at an ad-infested website. It’s truly reprehensible behaviour 🤮.
• PowerToys adds a lot of useful features to Windows. I use them so often that it trips me up when I use other Windows computers. There are so many great features that I’m gonna write a series on how much I love PowerToys. I’ve already written about Awake, PowerRun and Workspaces.
• KDE Connect is like a cross-platform Handoff which lets you shares files, clipboards and notifications between computers and mobile devices as well as let you control devices remotley kinda like Apple Devices do. I’ve written about it before.
• Snapdrop is a cross-platform AirDrop which lets you send files over the same network through your web browser. No desktop app needed.
• PDF24 provides a lot of useful tools for working with PDFS, such as converting to images, rotating them, compressing them among other things. IF you don’t want to install the app, you can use PDF24 online.
• Duet Display to use my iPhone as a computer screen.
• ImageMagick (via Winget) to convert images via the command line.
• vips (via Scoop) converts images as well. I want to compile my own version so I can use the new JPEG encoder jpegli as well as work with HEIC images.
• ffmpeg (via Winget using gyan.dev’s builds) to convert videos. I want to compile my own version so I can use a better version of AAC as well as x265
• yt-dlp (via Winget) to download videos from various websites that aren’t necessarily Youtube.
• scoop is a package manager I use alongside Winget. In addition to the other tool’s I’ve mentioned installing with this, I’ve also added:
  • libjxl, libwebp, libavif, oxipng, mozjpeg to compress images into JPEG XL, WebP, AVIF, PNG and JPEG images respectivley. I could use ImageMagick and VIPS but there are some comparisons I want to do which needs me to have the separate tools.
  • 7zip-zstd for file compression/decompression. I’m using the zstd version so I can compress and decompress files using brotli and zstandard.
  • ExifTool to work with image EXIF (medatata).
• ImageGlass to view pictures. The built in Windows tool is fine but I want to look at JPEG XL images and the new tool only supports it in explorer.
• Exif Glass (via Winget) is a GUI for viewing image EXIF using the underlying exiftool.
• XL Converter to convert images into JPEG XL as well as other formats.
• AnyDesk to remote into the work computer and it’s the best option right now since it supports unattended access. I should use Ruse Desk instead.
• Elgato Camera Hub to use my iPhone as a webcam via EpocCam. I want to move to VDO.ninja (maybe with the Electron Capture App) since it’s free.
• Microsoft Media Extensions:
  • HEVC needs a bit of work if you don’t want to spend $1. Must have if you want to view HEIC/HEIF images and HEVC from Apple devices.
  • AV1/AVIF.
• NVDA for screen reader testing.
• WinDirStat to map out storage in Windows.
• WinGet (via Winstall)—Iis a package manager for Windows that I’ve used to install. It already comes installed but I’m noting it down.
• Filezilla for FTP. It’s supported nativley in Windows but the Windows version doesn’t support SFTP/FTP over TLS.
• jxl-winthumb to get JPEG XL thumbnail support in Windows.

Media Creation

• Audacity for audio manipulation. Haven’t used this a lot though when I installed it recently I got some shit called “Muse Hub”.
• Inkscape for vector image editing. Also comes with a nice CLI.
• GIMP for image manipulation.
• Davinci Resolve for video editing and composting.
• OBS to record my computer screen.

Programming

• DevToys provides a useful set of programming utilities, like a Regex tester, cron command parser and many other things.
• Visual Studio Code is my text editor of choice. The only reason I started using it is because the previous editors I used, Brackets and Atom, were incredibly slow Electron apps. VS Code is an Electron app, but it’s way faster than those two editors which are no longer maintained. I should switch to vim. These are the extensions I use with it:
  • Debugger for Firefox to…debug websites in Firefox. Haven’t really used it, but I hope to at some point.
  • Python and Pylance for Python code completion, formatting and all.
  • Rainbow CSV to work with CSV files. I don’t use it for much but it seems feature rich so I should learn more about it maybe.
  • vscode-pdf to view PDFs in VS Code.
  • WSL to develop things within WSL. I use Ubuntu as my distro.
• Powershell 7 only because Windows insists that I install it.
• Python
  • uv is a Python package and project management tool.
• NodeJS installed via Fast Node Manager (fnm) on Windows.
• Docker Desktop for…nothing right now.
• Golang, mostly to work with Hugo Modules.
• XAAMP to work with PHP development. I should probably use Docker, but 🤷🏾‍♂️.
  • Composer (via Scoop) for PHP dependencies.
• Git for version control. All I know how to do is git commit, git push and git reflog for when I fuck shit up real bad.
• SQL Server Developer to work with the work database.
• SQL Server Management Studio
• SQLiteStudio to work with SQLite databases. DB Browser for SQLite is also pretty cool.
• WSL with Ubuntu
• Hugo (via Winget) is the static site generator I use to power this site.
• cloudflared to run Cloudflare tunnels. I use this at work to let coworkers use the account management system from home. I wouldn’t have listed it, but I need an ngrok-like thing for development which pushes a local server onto the web for testing. See also: localhost.run, Microsoft Dev Tunnels—actually, there’s a lot of options.
• Zeal (via Scoop) to save documentation offline.
• X2Go because I needed a desktop environment in the cloud. That story is coming soon.

Software I Don’t Use Anymore

• Bing Wallpaper since it’s now integrated into Windows. It gives me pretty looking wallpapers everyday.
• NVM for Windows since I now use fnm for nove version management.
• SASS (via Node) since I don’t need it right now.
• Logi Options+ because my MX Master receiver doesn’t work anymore.
• DB Browser for SQLite since I use SQLiteStudio instead. It’s not a bad option however.
• Microsoft Edge it’s great but it’s so fucking annoying. I’m already using it, why the incessent dark patterns?
• Netspot fow WiFi network mapping as internet at work got way better.