XDir and YourDir are two very different Windows programs, but they basically have the same purpose. They create your directory structure’s output which you can use for further processing. XDir is a powerful command line tool, whereas, YourDir is a relatively easy-to-use Windows tool with a GUI.

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You probably use the Windows Clipboard all day while working on a computer. The copy-and-paste-function is certainly one of the most important functions of any OS GUI. Unfortunately, the Windows Clipboard lacks a key feature. One can’t access older clipboard entries. I tested several free tools which close this gap.

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Are there some CDs that you use often? If so, you should consider copying them to your hard disk for faster access. This is also useful for servers since that means not going to the server room every time you have to insert a CD. However, there are some CDs which only work properly, if they are in a CD drive. The trick is to create an image of the CD and use CD drive virtualization software to mount the CDs to a drive letter. This post introduces some free CD virtualization tools.

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My VMware test environment runs on a host which I remotely control using RDP. I always found it strange that the Windows XP GUI is so slow within the VMware Workstation console with this setting. The same applies to VMware Server and most likely also to VMware GSX Server and ESX Server (I didn’t test the latter two). Application windows open somewhat slowly and the mouse pointer is quite jerky even with a 100 Mbit connection. Since it is faster with Windows Server 2003, I was sure that this is not only a bandwidth issue. Now, I found some time to solve the problem. Some of the tips here can also be used on other guest operating systems like Linux, for example.

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I welcome every tip that helps me to avoid typing. If one drags a file or folder from the Windows Explorer to the command line, the whole path plus the file name will be copied there. You might say, I should have known this. Indeed, you are right, but I didn’t. I found this tip at Digital Inspiration. The blog post there discusses some useful command line tools. Many of them are well known to most sysops though.

I just stumbled upon this funny video. It’s a song from Wes Borg about sysadmins. I guess, it’s already a year old or so, but I am posting it here anyway, since I really enjoyed it. It makes me like my job more somehow. Hope it does the same for you.

I’m a RAM addict. If your PC gets unbearable slow, forget about CPU power, hard disk speed or network speed; in most cases you just don’t have enough RAM. Maybe I am a bit overstating here, but I just said it: I am a RAM addict. FreeRAM XP Pro is a free tool that can help remedy acute memory shortage.

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Yesterday, I was quite surprised how bad the remote control performance of VMware Server beta 2 is. It was so slow that I wasn’t able to remotely manage a server using VMware Server Console with a 6 Mbit/s DSL connection. Today, I tested the performance of Virtual Machine Remote Client (VMRC) for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2.

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I am currently evaluating VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, in order to decide which of the two products we will use for server virtualization in the future. This blog post is a report about my test of the VMware server beta.

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TrueCrypt is a nifty free Open Source disk encryption tool. It encrypts a whole hard disk or partition and also can create virtual volumes. TrueCrypt uses encrypted container files which can be mounted like hard disks. Under Windows, you can assign a driver letter to such a virtual device. I tested version 4.1 for Windows.

Update: Please, also check out my review about TrueCrypt 5.

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