Applications in 2005

Way back in 2005, these were the resident applications I had on my Asus W1 laptop:

uTorrent, small bit torrent client
Cropper, screen capture tool
Apache 2.0.5
Tomcat 5.5.12
PowerArchiver, data (de)compressor
GreatNews, RSS aggregator
RSSBandit, RSS aggregator
WinSCP, secure FTP client
WinCVS 2.0.2-4
VobSub 2.23, subtitles to movies
ArtRage 1.0, simply beautiful, even though I don't use it often
Handy Recover, recover damaged drives
CDex 1.51, convert .WAVs into .MP3s (or any other target format)
ColorPic, grab color information from anything on the screen
DivX
Putty, Telnet/SSH client
StickIt, reminder notes floating on the desktop
Eclipse IDE
JBuilder 9 Enterprise

I did not have a similar list for 2004 but I can easily trace what changed now. I replaced obese and clumsy Azureus with tiny and elegant uTorrent (I'm not alone in thinking uTorrent rules!); chubby and messy SmartFTP had its place taken by slim and tidy WinSCP; kept a previous version of ColorPic, since the newest one fell pray to the setup trap.
The trend was to replace setup installations with equivalent executables.

But why executables? Aren't executables soooo (pre) Windows 95?
The reason is setup programs are larger, bloated, cumbersome (when not impossible) to completely remove from the system, and much harder to revert after an update.

When there is a new version of an executable, I double-click on it and try it for a few days. If I like it, I keep it and delete the previous version; if I don't I simply delete it and that's it. No add remove programs panel, no search and delete registry entries, no disk cleanup.

For a setup program I have to uninstall the previous version or watch the newer version do that for me. Uninstall operations, even when successful, do not yield tidy and neat systems: surprisingly, (system+program A) - program A != system. If I preferred the previous version I'm left with a hard to follow and hard to get rid of registry and application data debris.
The SmartFTP uninstall left a few folders with 5+ Megs of data hanging about in my system; Azureus left trails of application data and whatnot; MySQL and its tools, left wrong, obsolete, and hard to remove entries on the Add and Remove Programs panel.
One otherwise awesome tool, Inspiration, sent me to hell and back to fully remove it from my system after their trial period was over. Yes, of course I did not buy it in the end.

And I think I had enough.
Now, every time I'm given an executable alternative with the same functionality and at least the same quality I will replace without blinking.

Prediction: in 2006, Eclipse will forever replace JBuilder.