New laptop set up: just switch on and go...?

I've been setting up a new computer today.  Am I getting slower or is setting up a new laptop computer getting more tortuous? Maybe it's just that this is an infrequently used skill?  Anyway it took most of the morning and part of the afternoon.

• Sorted battery out.
• Did new computer Windows 7 rigmarole
• Ignoring McAfee advice that I needed to register a McAfee account before removal, I removed McAfee first via the Windows uninstaller; then rebooted and downloaded McAfee removal tool; ran this as an administrator and rebooted again
• Installed Sophos via remote user disk (the Open University has a licence covering home users). Not as smooth as it should have been; again had to run as an administrator and of course Windows 7 doesn't facilitate the easy set up from starting of an administrator account; (for OU readers run it from the OUlocal.bat file in the main folder rather than the sophos-install.bat file in the sophos folder - for some reason trying to install from the latter file gets part way through and then tries to connect to a network printer and fails)
• Next installed Firefox
• Revise to personal preference the privacy and proxy and security Firefox settings
• Install Skype; find user's lost Skype password; set preferred privacy settings
• Install Thunderbird
• Set up email account on Thunderbird; again this took a little longer than expected because I made a series of simple errors when entering the IMAP and smtp server settings
• Next step should be installing Enigmail GPG extension for Thunderbird
• Next and most importantly installed Linux, Ubuntu 12.04 in this case
  
• Couple of reboots later and Ubuntu is running smoothly
• Needed language support update
• Needed about 230MB of other updates via the Software Updater
• Install Synaptic package manager
• Install Thunderbird for Linux and set up account
• Install Enigmail GPG extension
• Install Skype for Linux; set privacy settings etc
• Install recordMyDesktop
• Install Chrome and Flash for Linux (there are going to be no further Flash updates for Linux but Google are taking over and will integrate to Chrome)
• Install audio/video codecs
• Set Ubuntu privacy settings to suit
• Set Firefox proxies, security, privacy settings
• Install LibreOffice Global Menu

Then you're pretty much ready to go.  Now that wasn't too difficult was it? Though why is it I still think I've missed something obvious?

Just on the Ubuntu 12.04, it's worth checking out Joey Sneddon's 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 12.04. and Sean from novelldesktop's 5 things to do after installing Ubuntu 12.04.