[Devzero]

OH! And NEVER forget your sack of PwNaGe!

[tweakmonkey]

Ultimate Boot CD's another alternative that's quick, free, and easy. For memory, hard drive, and CPU stability tests it's pretty useful.

[MSP]

Originally Posted by Devzero

Hiren's boot CD has everything you will ever need. The Winternals tools are not that impressive. You will need a thumb drive with the newest versions of: hijackthis, rootkit revealer, icesword (if you can find it =P), crap cleaner, winsock fix, and I always like to have a copy of spysweeper and ewido with the latest def files.

Any version of Linux can be very useful for data rescue. Knoppix is a good way to go.

Hiren's boot CD? Looking for that now. And I ordered a 2GB thumb drive last night.

[Cartman]

Originally Posted by Dan-T3D

Ultimate Boot CD's another alternative that's quick, free, and easy. For memory, hard drive, and CPU stability tests it's pretty useful.

i've used this a few times... it was pretty nice to use

u DONT need knopix if u have Winternals 2005 btw dont waist your time

[Undertaker989]

Originally Posted by Dan-T3D

Ultimate Boot CD's another alternative that's quick, free, and easy. For memory, hard drive, and CPU stability tests it's pretty useful.

I've used that before. it is a lifesaver if you don't want to boot into any OS but need to run something that accesses network shares.

For example, we used UBD to boot to DOS, authenticated to the domain, mapped a network drive to a server with image files on it and then started up Powerquest image center to image the box in question.

this method was better than using a boot disk w/ the powercast client that powerquest supports b/c the powercasting can sometimes bog down the network too much and the school we admin doesn't like it when we break their internets.

[MSP]

I tell yah, that 2GB USB drive is about the best tool I've ever bought. On my recent trip to Pittsburg we were replacing every PC in the building (200+), and were migrating users data. Well the damn file server filled up! Without that drive I would have been screwed, as there was no trust relationship between the old domain / PCs and the new. It would have been a bitch.

[hans5849]

I thought of a few other things

-Spinrite Great for checking for hard drive failure
-Analog X Max Mem Its a older program but for computers with lower amounts of ram its great at freeing it up
-nLite and MSFN's Unattended Windows : Unattended Windows Introduction for making formatting quicker

[GOG427]

power supply tester
zip ties
nibbler
extra thermal paste
usb wifi adapter

[MSP]

Originally Posted by GOG427

power supply tester
zip ties
nibbler
extra thermal paste
usb wifi adapter

Funny you should mention that, Dell just sent me a free one. Their bean counters did the math and figured out they would save a lot of money if all Dell certified techs had power supply testers and weren't ordering motherboards by mistake.

[GOG427]

hell i built one about 10 years ago .

[Mr. Ali]

Very handy tool if you need to get into a win2k/xp/vista system that is password protected:

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

[Electric_Head]

Ali, check out this program/Live CD. This one will display the passwords that are allready set in the SAM. Encrypted SAM or not. I think the one you posted only lets you change them?

Ophcrack

[ivanolo]

Just a link I came across while browsing another forum....

Free Windows Add-Ons & Updates* : PCversusMac.com / PCnMac.com / XPvsX.com

[vaporbrains]

Originally Posted by XEN

1. Soldering iron
2. Hammer

number 2 is always handy! haha

[Goofus Maximus]

There's a powertoy for Windows XP that I didn't know about till lately. Cleartype Tuner.

Also, I've switched from Zipgenius (resource hog and behaves badly with corrupt/incomplete RAR files) to PeaZip. It's ten billion times better, just from the little time I've spent with it.

[tweakmonkey]

SharePod - Free

Easily move music to and from your iPod or iPhone without iTunes.