Any and all jobs have a few tools of the trade that are essential to the successful completion of your tasks. So, too, with IT support. Whether in the office or out working with a client, I usually have a few tools with me, such as:
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Category: Tools
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Toolkit essentials – Physical tools
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Turn any website into a desktop widget
AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) looks like one of the contenders for the way things are going in terms of simple programming interfaces. One example of this is Adobe Digital Editions, which runs on AIR, and I have recently discovered a second, called Snippage. Simply put, Snippage allows you to track a specific portion of a website as a desktop widget.
It’s all as simple as installing the program, and then selecting what you want to follow. The possibilities for this are varied, such as following an auction, a poll or just about anything else you might want to follow off the web. In addition to selecting a specific selection, you can also set the update interval, or leave the widget static.
Caveat lector: Snippage is currently in Beta stage, and the developer specifically says that it might behave “oddly” -
Three free tools to restore and recover files
I’ve been there, and I’m sure you have too. You’ve spent hours on a document, you go to bed, and the next morning, it’s gone! Oh crud! Now what? Here are three free Windows utilities that have worked charms for me:
The first thing I’d try is an utility called Free File Recovery by AVN Media Technologies. This does basic file recovery, and does not scan sector by sector. Still, it has on occasion done the trick for me.
The second tool I’d recommend is called simply Restoration, and does not require installation. It goes deeper than Free File Recovery, and actually scans sectors separately. While less intuitive than Free File Recovery, this, too, has saved me on occasion.
The third and last tool I’m going to recommend is called PC Inspector File Recovery, and comes from a German company called Convar.
The most important tip I can give you when it comes to recovering lost files is to use the storage media in question as little as possible until you can actually try to restore the lost data, as any use will increase the likelyhood that the file will be lost forever. -
Free Registry and Spyware utility
A while back, I was tipped off about an application called Glary Utilities, billed as “The #1 free, powerful and all-in-one utility in the world market!” This piqued my interest, and I installed it, deciding to try it out, as it has received favorable reviews from several places, including CNet.
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A better way to see trends
An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
One of my habits when troubleshooting troubles is to have a look at the event viewer. While event viewer allows you to see specific events, it can sometimes be difficult to see trends. In Windows XP, we don’t really have a choice, we’ll have to look through the data, and parse it ourselves.
Enter Windows Vista, and Windows Reliability Monitor. As the screendump below shows, it will show you, as a graph, when things have started to deteriorate. You can look through the history, and see on what days there have been many errors. It also gives you a reliability index rating, from 10 to 1 (Ten being very good, 1 being exceedingly bad. Coupled with event viewer logs, Reliability Monitor makes it that much easier to read logs, and solve problems.
Click the image to see the full size version -
ISO burning – as easy as it comes
From time to time, I come across having to burn an ISO onsite. I usually carry with me an external hard drive on which I have a few essential ISO’s, such as Ubuntu, UBCD or GParted. Now, while I have software to burn ISO’s on my computer, I don’t always bring my computer with me when going to see a customer. Luckily, there is a nifty little app to help me burn the discs I might need.
The program is called “Free ISO Burner“, and it does exactly what it is meant to do, no more, no less. There are two advantages to this program. The first is the fact that it takes up less than one megabyte of storage. The second is that it runs, simply and smoothly, without installation. These two features means it’s one of the many programs I always have with me on a memorystick.
A quick word on ISO’s. Wikipedia defines ISO’s as -
Finding your (serial) keys
You know the situation; you’ve got problems with your computer, and need to reinstall it. However, you’ve got loads of software installed, and need the serial keys for them. What you need is a keyfinder. There are many out there, but the one I’ve found to be most useful is called the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder.
The keyfinder comes in a zipped file containing the program itself, a config file and a GPL. Once unzipped, simply run it, to see the serial keys it finds:
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Taking screenshots of DVD’s
I’ve been having a lot of problems getting screenshots of DVDs I am reviewing. Searching online, I’ve found many solutions, but none that have worked consistently. I decided to try out a few things myself, and here’s my solution for the problem:
To do this, you’ll need to have Media Player Classic installed. (You can get Media Player Classic here.) Once you’ve got MPC installed, you’ll have to set a few settings to get it to work, or you’ll get this errormessage:
In the Options menu of MPC, you’ll want to play around with the settings until you get it to work. You’ll want to restart Media Player Classic before testing the settings. Here are the settings that worked well for me:
To take screenshots, simply go to the “File” menu, and press “Save Image”. Here’s a screenshot I took, just as an example.
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A better Task Manager
Windows Task Manager is a decent enough tool, but it doesn’t really give you all that much information, nor is it always able to do what you need it to, such as end certain processes. By default, the Processes view looks something like this:
While this is enough for most users, it isn’t always enough information, nor capability, for techies. A wonderful little company called SysInternals, now owned by Microsoft, has made a wonderful little utility called Process Explorer. Let’s have a look at the information it gives us:
Not only does it feature tree-structure of processes, but it also features windows to show live data and history of CPU usage, Commit history and I/O Bytes. Clicking any of these windows will display a full system information window, as shown below. These features are only the tip of the iceberg of what should make Process Explorer an essential part of any techie tool kit.
