I don’t really like re-installing Windows because it’s boring and takes a long time to get everything back to normal. Installing Windows takes about 30 minutes, then looking for correct drivers takes another 30 minutes, downloading and installing latest third party software should take an hour and finally restoring emails and settings takes another 30 minutes. This is if everything goes smoothly without problems. There were a few times I ended up discovering even more problems during Windows reinstallation and had to get them fixed too.

Last weekend I went to a friend’s house to fix his HP desktop computer and needed to reinstall Windows because it was badly corrupted. Fortunately branded computers such as HP has recovery disc where I can just pop in the disc and the installation is all automated. I don’t even need to worry about looking for the correct drivers because the recovery disc has all that.

When the whole Windows restoration process has completed, there’s something else that we should install before the third party software and that is .NET Framework, Java, DirectX, Flash player, Silverlight, Shockwave player, and Visual C++ Runtimes.

These addons are important so that the user can able to run .NET Framework application, run Java applets, view websites with flash or shockwave and also better gaming performance with the latest DirectX. However, downloading and installing every version of .NET Framework, hotfixes and all the addons above would take you a lot of time.

Here’s an all in one package called All in One Runtimes which contains all versions of .NET Framework with their hotfixes, latest DirectX 9.0c, Adobe Flash Player 10, Microsoft Silverlight 3.0, Shockwave Player 11.5.0.596, Java Runtime Environment 6 and Visual C++ Runtimes. The good thing about this AiO pack is it can automate the process of installing all the addons without you doing anything.
All in one runtimes addon

There are 2 versions of All in One Runtimes. The first one is for 32-bit Windows which can be installed on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003. As for the 64-bit version, the pack can be installed on Windows Vista and 7. With this All in One Runtimes pack, I no longer need to waste my time on downloading and installing runtimes. Of course this pack is not always useful since we can use nlite/vlite to integrate them into the Windows installers but it would definitely save us a lot of time and trouble when we’re faced with a computer with a recovery disc.

[ Download All in One Runtimes for 32-bit | 64-bit ]

[tags]framework, aio, addon, runtime, java[/tags]