The 32 Absolutely Essential (and Free) Apps for each new PC - 7

Those software download address:
InstallPad
AppSnap

Now that we’ve finished our list, we’ve got one more cool app to show you. It’s called InstallPad, and it does something that’s very simple and very useful: It install applications for you. You just feed it a list of setup files available online, and it takes care of the rest. There are other programs that do essentially the same thing, such as AppSnap, but we’re sticking with InstallPad because it makes it the easiest to create custom software lists.

We covered a whole lot of apps in our Essentials list, and now we’re going to use InstallPad to make it easy for you to install them all (or just whichever ones you want) at once. Read on to download our InstallPad essential applications list, and learn how to use it.

Step 1: Get InstallPad

Even installers need to be installed, so we’ll take care of that first. The app can be found in the download section of the InstallPad website. It requires the Microsoft .NET framework 2, which you can get here if it’s not already on your system. InstallPad was written for XP, and isn’t guaranteed to work with Vista, though we were able to run it on a Vista box with no major problems.

There’s no installation necessary beyond unzipping the InstallPad .zip file somewhere on your drive. Make sure to remember the location, because we’re going to put another file there later on.

Step 2: Get the Maximum PC Essential InstallPad Application List

InstallPad comes with a default list of software, but it’s not nearly as complete as ours and is badly outdated, besides. We’ll replace it with a custom list, created from the apps on our Essential 33 list.

Unfortunately, because some companies make their setup files inaccessible to direct links, not every app on the list works with InstallPad. Still, almost all of the apps do work, and you can download the list right here. That archive contains two list files. The file called MaxPCAppList.XML is set to try and install the files in silent mode, meaning you won’t see the installer, and default setting will be used. This makes for a much faster install of multiple programs, but at the cost of some control. If you’d rather run the installers normally,use the other file, called MaxPCAppList-nosilent.XML

Extract whichever list file you choose to the directory containing the InstallPad executable.

Step 3: Run InstallPad

Now that you’ve got all the files you need, it’s time to start InstallPad. Run the executable, and a Window will pop up showing the default software list. We don’t want any of that business, so click the “Open an application list” text in the bottom left corner. In the browser that pops up, select the application list file that you downloaded (either MaxPCAppList.xml or MaxPCAppList-nosilent.xml).

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Now InstallPad should show a list of applications from our Essential 33 list. You can check whichever ones you want, and then press the “Install Checked” button in the bottom right to automatically download and install them all.
(from maximumpc.com)