Submitted by Jacob Beneke - Blog: OS Fanatic

From the project website.

UBCD4Win is a bootable recovery CD that contains software used for repairing, restoring, or diagnosing almost any computer problem. Our goal is to be the most complete and easy to use free computer diagnostic tool. Almost all software included in UBCD4Win are freeware utilities for Windows®. Some of the tools inlcuded are “free for personal use” copies so users need to respect these licenses. A few of the tools included in UBCD4Win are paid for and licensed software owned by UBCD4win. On occasion we work with software companies/authors for permission to include their software in our download or have requested their software better support PE.

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There must be some guys at Microsoft who are quite frustrated about all this Vista bashing. And what would a developer do to defend himself? Right, he would program a tool that proves that you are wrong, not the operating system. It is a matter of fact that many blame Windows if something doesn’t work as it is supposed to. Hardware problems, sloppily programmed device drivers, buggy apps, or an overloaded and mal-configured system—it is always Windows and especially Microsoft who are to blame.

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In my opinion, there are only a few things that are changed for the worse under Vista. One is the replacement of Boot.ini with the Boot Configuration Data Store (BCD Store). Perhaps using an ini file for storing the boot configuration was a bit outdated, but replacing it with the command line tool bcdedit is not really a better solution. It is even standard under Linux nowadays also to offer a GUI tool for this purpose. You can take this post as an example of why I usually try to avoid the command prompt.

Today, I had to change the boot configuration for the first time under Vista. It is a test computer where I have Vista and Windows Server 2008 installed. I wanted to replace a Vista x86 installation with Vista x64, so I deleted the corresponding partition and created a new one. After I installed Vista x64, the Windows Server 2008 installation vanished from the boot menu. That was not very smart of Vista setup, but okay, it is not a big deal to add the entry again, or so I thought. With Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, I would just have edited the boot.ini, which I had done countless times before. Thus, I thought, it shouldn’t be a big deal to use bcdedit this time.

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We have seen three rounds so far, and Vista clearly won two of them (Security, Manageability) with knock outs and lost the last one (Reliability) on points, mostly because the old champion XP just picked up lots of experience in its countless fights over the last 7 years. Let’s see if the old man can also outlast the young challenger when it comes to elasticity and smoothness. We are talking now about usability.

This is my summary of referee Kennedy’s judgment of the fourth round:

Aero’s changes are only superficial. Many settings were moved to other places which makes it difficult for XP veterans to find their way on Vista. Most modifications of the user interface were just made for the sake of change and didn’t improve usability. Some modifications are even a change for the worse. The “up a level button” in Explorer is missing, the Search field shows up much too often, and the backup tool doesn’t provide enough feedback about the success of backups.

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Submitted by Petar Weigand

Find out what is using your file system in a pie-chart display. To me it’s much easier to surf through pie charts to find out what is using the most of my free disk space. I’ve also deployed this utility to my end users because it’s so easy, free and platform independant.

From the publisher’s website:

JDiskReport provides different perspectives about your disk drives: absolute and relative sizes, size distribution, distribution of modification dates, and distribution of types.

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Rate this tool: (3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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AutoRuns is the most comprehensive auto startup monitor. There are many locations where applications can configure Windows to start automatically whenever the computer boots-up. The new version 9.0 shows some new locations for Vista computers such as Scheduled Tasks or the Sidebar gadgets. If I suspect that a computer has been infected with malware, AutoRuns is the first tool I start. However, in most cases I use it to get rid of auto start components of newly installed programs. Often they only slow down the computer without being really useful. The only disadvantage of AutoRuns is that its complexity. It displays so many different entries in numerous different locations that you easily lose track of things.

Rate this tool: (8 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5)

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mst IsUsedBy is a simple, but very useful free tool. It allows you determine what process opened a particular file. You only have to drag the file to the IsUsedBy window. This can be useful if Windows doesn’t allow you to move or delete a file.

mst IsUsedBy

Rate this tool: (3 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5)

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Submitted by Patrick Klages

A great tool to replace mstsc. It allows me to have several servers up and accessable at noe time and easily move btw them.

Publisher’s description:

Terminals is a multi tab terminal services/remote desktop client. It uses Terminal Services ActiveX Client (mstscax.dll).
The project started from the need of controlling multiple connection simultaneously.

General Networking Tools added:
Ping, Trace Route, WMI Explorer, TCP Connections, Network Interfaces, Whois, DNS Lookups, CPU History Graph, Shares List, Time Syncronization, Servers List

Terminals

Michaels’s note:
Please check out this comparison of six free terminal services tools.

Rate this tool: (5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)

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As promised, I added a feature that allows you to rate the free admin tools that were submitted so far. You can assign 1-5 stars to each of the tools, with 5 starts as the highest. There are now two lists. One list has all the details of each free tool. It is sorted in the order the tools were submitted. You can use this list to rate a tool. The other list only displays the name of the tools with their ratings. The most popular tools are on top. Those tools which were not yet rated are not displayed here.

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23 great free Windows management utilities have been submitted. Thanks a lot! Since it is a bit cumbersome for you to check whenever there is a new tool, I will post the new submissions in an article every now and then. This post contains all the tools submitted so far, but if you want to link to them, you should take the original article because that will be updated continuously.

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