What's in your Tools CD?
 

I work as a computer technician (Windows PCs) and today I decided to clean up my tools and utility CD. I basically removed all the stuff I never really use, but I also want to be prepared for almost anything...

The stuff I have so far:

• Spyware removal toos - SpyBot, AdAware, HijackThis, CWShredder, HSRemove, About:Buster
• Various virus removal tools from Symantec
• Aida32 for system info
• WinSock repair utilities for Windows XP/2000 and 98/ME
• Windows Key Viewer

I used to have Windows XP and 2000 service packs on there but I think I'm making a seperate CD for Windows patches and SPs. I also have a Knoppix CD and a bootable CD for changing Windows 2000/XP user account passwords (in case the user forgets the Admin password).

I am also going to try to copy the most necessary stuff onto a USB thumb drive, as soon as I get one. Or maybe skip the CD and put the whole thing on a thumb drive?

So what do all you techies use? Am I missing anything?

This looks interesting:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

A bootable linux cd: Lnx-BBC (business card sized ~50MB) or for a normal cd something like Knoppix. Of course there are hundreds of other CD bootable linux distros.

Ah interesting, I hadn't even looked into those before. Thanks.

I dont keep a personal one (though I should...), but the ones we use at work have:

-virus defs and installers
-lots and lots of spyware removal apps
-commonly used virus removal tools
-various apps like fport, pskill, msconfig, winsock repair utils, etc etc etc
-drivers needed for various models we support

Pretty much the basic stuff, but a lot of it--it takes up the entire CD. We also have a bootable rescue CD and a simple SAM password resetter so we can get into machines when clients forget to provide us with passwords.

Whats funny is we have a duplicator (burns 8 CDs at a time) and have to make new sets twice a week because of new virus defs/removal tools/spyware defs or because they jus get lost.

The ultimate boot cd is nice, so is Knoppix for those pc's that wont boot into the installed OS. I also carry a couple of free spyware/virus/trojan detection/cleaning programs and a few paid ones. Radmin is a nice little app to drop on a pc if you know you will be supporting it more then once and want to do it from another location in windows. I like CPU-Z and Sandra for system info. So much of this is system specific. Patchs, drivers, updates, and things like that are all specific to what your supporting. I'll be damned if I'm going to keep current cd's with patches for all the operating systems out there. :crazy: