Links

Tools

PC technicians are only as good as their tools. Along with the obligatory Philips No.1 screwdriver and giant-hammer-for-hitting-things-with the average toolkit will contain floppy disks and CDs full packed with useful software.

Diagnostic Tools

Utility Geek

http://www.utilitygeek.com/

This great website has a very wide range of tools including CMOS wipe tools, network sniffers and hardware monitors.

PC Check

http://www.eurosoft-uk.com/pc_check.htm

This software runs diagnostic tests on PC hardware and can be used for burn-in tests, where the machine is placed under strain for several hours.

MicroScope

http://www.micro2000.com/toolkit/index.php

Another diagnostic tester that supports burn-in tests.

Disk Utilities

SpinRite

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

SpinRite's author Steve Gibson has often been accused of over-hyping himself and his products but this disk scanning and sector recovery tool is highly rated by many professionals.

HDD Regenerator

http://www.dposoft.net/

Another disk scanning and sector recovery tool, comparable to SpinRite. It is claimed that this particular tool places less stress on drives when correcting errors.

Active@ Undelete

http://www.active-undelete.com/

Recovers lost, deleted or formatted data from disk drives. This is one of the few recovery tools that works with floppy disks, USB Flash drives and multimedia cards.

Heidi Eraser

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

A very impressive data scrubbing tool that repeatedly overwrites data to make it impractical for someone to recover files using commercial data recovery software. This is very useful if decomissioning a system that contains confidential information.

System Information

Everest Home Edition

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=everest+home+edition+2.20

Everest (previously known as Aida32) gives a detailed report on a PC's devices and resources and can run directly from a CD or USB pen drive. The free "home edition" was discontinued last year but is still available from a number of download sites. Cutting-edge commercial versions are available directly from manufacturer Lavalys.

Bootable CDs

Microsoft Windows PE

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/sa/benefits/winpe.mspx

Windows Preinstallation Environment is a bootable CD containing a command-line version of Windows XP / 2003. The disc is used when preparing systems for OS installation and can also be used as an emergency boot disk. NOTE: This product is only supplied to OEM manufacturers and companies who have volume licensing agreements with Microsoft.

Bart PE Builder

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

One of the most useful tools ever! This program creates a bootable CD containing a scaled-down version of Windows XP, which means you can perform a clean boot and examine the contents of a hard disk — especially handy for virus and spyware scans because it bypasses the hard disk boot sequence completely. To use this product you will need a Windows XP installation CD that has been slipstreamed with SP1 or SP2.