Toolbox utilities and essentials

[ether.real]

Power Supply Tester:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 905&depa=0

[video]

http://www.48bitlba.com/



hardrive install

[bruhthaKuga]

Digital Dolly is a freeware drive imaging utility for home users. It works fine you will just have to read the manual carefully. You will have to make a FAT32 partition to save an image of a NTFS system partition. Don't forget to mount the partition or drive that you want to save to.

http://www.innotrix.com/digital_dolly/download.htm

[Mac4970]

Prime95 - http://www.majorgeeks.com/Prime95_d4363.html

"This program is a good stress test for the CPU, memory, L1 and L2 caches, CPU cooling, and case cooling. The torture test runs continuously, comparing your computer's results to results that are known to be correct. Any mismatch and you've got a problem! Note that the torture test sometimes reads from and writes to disk but cannot be considered a stress test for hard drives".

Prime 95 Torture test - an excellent little program for cpu thermal and/or stabilty testing in overclocked or normal system setups.

[trexntx]

Ran across an article in PC World today where it gives a method whereby you can toggle your screen saver with a single click.

Useful for preventing the screensaver from interfering with burning, degragging or other activities without the difficulty of navigating to the dialog box to do it within display properties.

Not sure where it would be best to post this, so if somebody thinks it ought to be moved then by all means go right ahead.

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0, ... 423,00.asp

[Hardware Junkie]

New BHO scanner.

http://pcworld.com/downloads/file_descr ... 611,00.asp

Looks promising.

[Ryn]

Crap Cleaner

[Aussie]

Startup Library list:-

http://startup.iamnotageek.com/



Aussie

[Sabrewings]

Hijack This Log analyzer:

http://www.hijackthis.de/index.php?langselect=english

[Karlsweldt]

Lots of good suggestions for "software" tools, but no "hardware" tools.
If I may add, the "good" computer toolbox should not be without a few different types of Hemostats, for picking up those dropped parts in tight places, or removing/installing the jumper caps on pinset headers. Also a decent-sized pair of end-nipper pliers, to cut protruding wire ends from circuit boards. Work well at squeezing the "arms" on plastic standoffs for removal. Crutchfield's catalog is one source.. there are many others, including medical supply houses, for the Hemostats. The pliers and other tools are available at most hardware stores. A pair of "chip poppers" similar to the ones made for removing the older '486' CPUs will be of assistance in removing any CPU from its socket, if you have no fingernails to get under the chip. Gently, of course!