There are two versions of XXClone, a free one and a pro edition. The pro edition has some additional features which are useful if you want to be able to schedule the creation of images.

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British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) warns (PDF) British schools and colleges from deploying Vista and Office 2007. In their interim report, they concluded that Vista and Office 2007 don’t have must-have features that would justify their early deployment. In my opinion, their estimation neglects some important factors.

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FTCheck is a very simple but usefull tool for sys admins. It searches for compressed files, EFS encrypted files, Alternate Data Streams, Sparse Files, Offline Files, and Repare Points. It lists all its findings in a text file. FTCheck has a German user interface. That means, you have to know a few German words to use it:

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There are many good autostart managers available for Windows XP/2003. The most comprehensive one is, probably, Sysinternals Autoruns (now Microsoft). Runalyzer from Spybot Search & Destroy, however, offers an interesting feature that is quite useful if you’re afraid of having spyware on your PC that make use of rootkit technology: You can autostart programs on Windows installations using attached hard disks.

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If you are working with roaming user profiles (server based user profiles) in your organisation, then be prepared for big changes. Windows Vista and Windows XP user profiles are not compatible! However, you can use folder redirection to make XP and Vista roaming user profiles interoperable. Even if you are only working with local user profiles, I recommend reading on.

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James O’Neill summarized the different ways to backup Vista: imageX, CompletePC Backup, Vista Restore Points, Vista Backup, and Folder Redirection.

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A while ago ago, I wrote about the Bulk Rename Utility which offers more or less the same functionality as Ant Renamer, i.e. you can rename multiple files and folders. However, Ant Renamer is much easier to use.

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Sometime ago there was a debate on 4sysops about the use of outbound filtering for personal firewalls. Some argued that once malware got started on the desktop, it is already too late to stop it with a personal firewall. I recently tested the outbound filter of Vista’s firewall. In my view, it makes sense for standard users to use it, but not, probably, for administrators.

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Link Shell Extension is a free tool that allows you to create hardlinks and junctions on NTFS partitions with the Windows Explorer. In Windows XP/2003, you can only do this with the command line tool, fsutil. With Link Shell Extension, you can create hardlinks in a more convenient way.

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HeahlthMonitor 3.1 is an easy-to-use free monitoring tool for Window XP/2003. It uses plug-ins to monitor disk space, changes of file attributes, CPU load, memory free space, event log entries, and Windows services on the machine, where it is installed. It supports remote monitoring using ping and http. You can also write your own scripts to check the availability of a certain service.

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