by Dinesh on December 29, 2009
It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making a Netbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.
Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.
Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.
by Dinesh on December 28, 2009
One of the biggest frustrations when installing Windows XP was making sure you had the correct CD for your license key. Windows Vista fixed this problem by having a universal CD that contained all versions (all 32bit versions or all 64bit versions, not both) and simply installed the version that the key matched.
Now that Windows 7 is out, Microsoft have reverted back to needing a separate disk for each version which is annoying for us computer technicians. However, the only difference between each DVD is a small 51 byte configuration file called ei.cfg which tells the installer what version disc it is. If you were to turn your DVD into an ISO, remove this ei.cfg file and write it back to a DVD, that DVD would become a Universal DVD.
ei.cfg Removal Utility will make this easy for you. Just create an ISO with your legitimate Windows 7 DVD, run this tool, choose the ISO and let it run. Once it has finished, just write the ISO back to a DVD again and you would only need to carry one 32bit version and one 64bit version to support any Windows 7 install onsite.
Of course, your client would still need to provide you with a working key for the Windows 7 install to work.
by Dinesh on December 28, 2009
Have you ever had to backup a clients files to a CD or DVD? I think most of us have at some point and it can be tedious sorting out how many files will fit on a single disk, especially if the client has a lot of data.
This is where Capacity comes in to make the task of backing up to CD or DVD much easier. Capacity will automatically separate the files into different CD or DVD sized folders. It can even create these CD/DVD sized folders based on the file type if you want so you can keep all documents on one CD and pictures on another. There is also other sorting criteria such as by month created, by month modified and by file size.
Capacity is small and mostly portable (requires .NET 3.5) application with a donation-ware license. This means it is free to use but if you like it you should consider donating to the developer.
This application is definitely worth keeping on your onsite USB drive and the backup machine in your workshop.
