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
This great website has a very wide range of tools including CMOS wipe
tools, network sniffers and hardware monitors.
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.
Another diagnostic tester that supports burn-in tests.
Disk Utilities
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.
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.
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.
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 (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
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.
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.