Building a development machine - Start to finish...

I was recently forced to re-load all of the required software on a new development machine.

No! I'm not stupid. I may be a little crazy, but that's debatable.

I was forced to load the machine because some wonderful people (read thieves) decided that my development laptop and all other computer equipment in my home, should be theirs.

It took 4 days for my office to buy me a new machine, and in those 4 days, I went a little nuts from boredom. No form of computer for more than a day, and I feel it big time.

Anyway... The new laptop arrived with Windows 7 installed.

The first step was to install Visual Studio 2010. That took what seemed to be a lifetime. Then I installed SP1, and that strangely enough took even longer to install.

SQL Server was next. 2008 R2 takes another life time to install and configure. I then had to copy the live DB to my laptop. It's a whole 28Gig!!! That took about 5 or 6 hours to copy, because low and behold, there happened to be network connectivity issues in the office on that particular day.

So now I had a machine that I could at least begin to work on.

Then I found out just how many other little, but essential pieces of software that I use on a daily basis to do seemingly simple things with...

Paint.Net for those little image creation and re-sizing, colour sampling and general editing of images.
Notepad2 or Notepad++ for simple or complex text editing.
Google Chrome and/or Firefox for consistency checking of web apps.
Any nice snipping tool for grabbing of sections of the screen.
Dropbox or Google Drive for cloud storage of almost anything you want to backup.
Acrobat Reader for opening PDF docs.

There are also those million and one little apps that I have written over the years that make my development life simpler.

All in all, I think it took me about 30 hours to get to a point where I could actually do some work. This also excludes re-writing those little apps, that I forgot to backup, that perform small but crucial tasks for me. I know my very big, huge (some very bad swear word here), mess up!

How about you... How long does it take you to get a new machine going to a point of being able to get some work done?