STFU && RTFM

A while back, I was tipped off about an application called Glary Utilities, billed as “The #1 free, powerful and all-in-one utility in the world market!” This piqued my interest, and I installed it, deciding to try it out, as it has received favorable reviews from several places, including CNet.
 
The installation is just as simple as it should be, the only annoyance is that it offers to install the Ask.com toolbar, as well as set ask.com as the default search provider. While I harbor no antipathies towards ask.com, I don’t particularly like toolbars that don’t add any new functionality.
 
According to GlarySoft, Glary Utilities offer a wide array of functionality, from system optimization to spyware removal. The main window looks like this:
 

 
It looks to me like they might be trying to do too many things in one utility, but all in all, it looks like a decent tool, and can be found here.

An old joke says that there are three kinds of lies; black lies, white lies and the internal polling data of political parties. The latter example is typically statistics, and while statistics can be presented in such a way as to prove almost anything, raw, unprocessed statistics are a great tool.
 
One of my habits when troubleshooting troubles is to have a look at the event viewer. While event viewer allows you to see specific events, it can sometimes be difficult to see trends. In Windows XP, we don’t really have a choice, we’ll have to look through the data, and parse it ourselves.
 
Enter Windows Vista, and Windows Reliability Monitor. As the screendump below shows, it will show you, as a graph, when things have started to deteriorate. You can look through the history, and see on what days there have been many errors. It also gives you a reliability index rating, from 10 to 1 (Ten being very good, 1 being exceedingly bad. Coupled with event viewer logs, Reliability Monitor makes it that much easier to read logs, and solve problems.
 

Click the image to see the full size version

From time to time, I come across having to burn an ISO onsite. I usually carry with me an external hard drive on which I have a few essential ISO’s, such as Ubuntu, UBCD or GParted. Now, while I have software to burn ISO’s on my computer, I don’t always bring my computer with me when going to see a customer. Luckily, there is a nifty little app to help me burn the discs I might need.
 
The program is called “Free ISO Burner“, and it does exactly what it is meant to do, no more, no less. There are two advantages to this program. The first is the fact that it takes up less than one megabyte of storage. The second is that it runs, simply and smoothly, without installation. These two features means it’s one of the many programs I always have with me on a memorystick.
 
A quick word on ISO’s. Wikipedia defines ISO’s as

“…an archive file (also known as a disc image) of an optical disc in a format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This format is supported by many software vendors. ISO image files typically have a file extension of .iso. The name ISO is taken from the ISO 9660 file system…”

Simply put, ISO’s contain the files and formatting of a specific optical disc (CD, DVD, BRD), and allows you to burn that image to a second disc. By burning the image, you get a carbon copy of the original disc. This is great for distributing software installation media over the net, and is also practical when you are stuck, without the CD you need, at a client’s offices. Provided, of course, that you actually brought the ISO…

Windows Task Manager is a decent enough tool, but it doesn’t really give you all that much information, nor is it always able to do what you need it to, such as end certain processes. By default, the Processes view looks something like this:

 
While this is enough for most users, it isn’t always enough information, nor capability, for techies. A wonderful little company called SysInternals, now owned by Microsoft, has made a wonderful little utility called Process Explorer. Let’s have a look at the information it gives us: 

 
Not only does it feature tree-structure of processes, but it also features windows to show live data and history of CPU usage, Commit history and I/O Bytes. Clicking any of these windows will display a full system information window, as shown below. These features are only the tip of the iceberg of what should make Process Explorer an essential part of any techie tool kit. 

In my job as a support technician, I use a plethora of different tools. I have collected the most useful ones in a list on my website, www.razumny.no.
 
For direct access to the list, go here.
 
I hope you find this useful.

Process Explorer
Originally uploaded by razumny

At a technical seminar, I was introduced to the magic of Process Explorer, a tool developed by SysInternals (now a Microsoft-owned company), which picks up where the taskmanager leaves off.
 
Found here, it is contained within a 1.5 MB zip-file, and it runs without installation.
 
At a glance, I am very simply put impressed. It is an intuitive and very strong tool, and it works admirably.