Windows Re-imaged

So my Windows XP laptop provided by work was slow as a dog and I didn't care what was on the local hard drive so I had IT re-image the whole thing. It is almost like a new machine again. It is really funny how badly that the machine gets bogged down after time. No viruses, no trojens it just plain got slow. Anyway so after getting it back I had the fun task of deciding which tools where the most neccissary and installing them. Here is the list and the order in which I installed them:

1. Opera - Favorite Browser
2. Firefox - Second Favorite Browser
3. Google Desktop - Productivity Tool (I really like the side bar with auto-hide)
4. Cygwin - *nix tools for windows (makes windows barable)
5. gvim - The best text editor in the universe
6. gaim - Protocal agnostic istant measanger client, yahoo, gmail, aol,etc
7. nvu - WYSIWYG web page tool (simplistic and open source)
8. Real VNC - Desktop sharing system (I do everything through VNC)

And thats it! These I believe are the essential tools to get just about anything done that you need to. Most of these tools are open source. Now if I could just wrap all these up in some sort of windows packaging system like linux distrobutions already have than I could wipe my drive clean on a quarterly basis and always have a fast responsive machine. We can all dream can't we?