Below is a list of tools that I had to restore on my "temp" Compaq nw8000 to get me back up to tech speed while I "WAIT" for HP to send me a replacement drive for my tc1100 that went belly up (I do think that God planned for it to happen before going on vacation to prove a point that I could go on vacation without a computer and still have fun … probably worth another blog post …):

1. Firefox + Flash plug-in (probably more of these to come)
2. Symantec Anti-Virus + Firewall
3. Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook); Visio; Project; & FrontPage
4. ActiveSync
5. Newsgator {thanks John C @ Newsgator for the Tech Support 😉 }
6. Clipmate
7. Plantronics USB drivers
8. MindManager
9. Verizon Wireless drivers
10. TextPad

Busy day … now to burn the mid-night oil and get some work done so I can try to enjoy the next three days at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference.

P.S. Also having my RSS feeds sync’d to Newsgator Online really helped a great deal also.  I am still in denial about losing my podcast links from Doppler.  I highly recommend that you do a complete backup and then poke around to make sure that 1% you didn’t back up had greater value then some of the stuff you did.