Ubergeeke’s Repair Kit: Software
This weekend’s project is the assembly of a basic portable computer repair kit. Yesterday, I talked about the hardware tools I’ve gathered for my kit. Today, I’ll cover the software side of things.
For repair, software falls into one of three categories, IMHO: BIOS, operating system, and other. The BIOS end of things is pretty self-explanatory, and not something I hack at a great deal when doing repair unless I need to do some updates of some sort.
At the operating system level, I’ve got three sub-categories to handle:
(1) Various flavors of Linux
(2) Mac OSX
(3) Windows What-Have-You. Mostly, I’ve been dealing with XP, but I had one case recently where a woman had a Windows 98 (!) system. (It worked surprisingly well, truth be told.)
Let’s start with Macs. I’ve got squat in the way of software tools for Macs. While I’ve got a PowerBook G4 that I use daily, I don’t have many friends with Macs. The ones who do have them just shell the bucks for official repairs when they need to have something fixed. Recently, though, a friend had a pretty significant hard drive failure, and I did a little research into Mac OSX data recovery tools. When I get a chance, I’ll probably tinker a bit with ProSoft’s Drive Rescue II. I’m still investigating other tools that might be helpful in this arena.
Moving on to the Linux side of things, I must admit that I tend to chicken out of system problems with workarounds more often than not. I’m running OpenSuSE 11.1 on my ThinkPad T43, and I haven’t had any issues major enough that I couldn’t at least hack my way around them. (Bad geek. Very bad geek. ) I have used a Knoppix LiveCD once or twice for partition resizing and restoration, but it wasn’t mission critical. I’ll have to investigate its capabilities a bit more in order to feel confident in a more serious situation. In my defense, the only person I know who has Linux problems that I might need to solve is - well, me.
That leaves the land of Windows. I’ve got a few password reset tools and have used System Mechanic for optimization and cleanup tasks, but generally my problem with Windows is that I don’t have my usual work environment in which to hack on things. Here’s what I mean: say I’m at a party and a friend mentions a computer problem he’s having. (This has happened to me more than once.) I offer to take a look at it because he’s offering tasty scotch in trade. I sit down behind the keyboard, and discover immediately that (a) he’s using IE7 and Firefox isn’t loaded on the system, (b) Norton AntiVirus is hogging all of his resources, but he doesn’t actively use it anymore, (c) his Internet connection is hosed so I can’t download my favorite troubleshooting tools.
This fix is obvious: I need to carry around my tools on a USB stick. For awhile, I’ve just had the installation files of these tools sitting in a subdir on the key I always have in my pocket. Last week, though, I finally got around to downloading PortableApps, and while I haven’t had cause yet to use it in a troubleshooting environment, I really like it. Firefox is already installed (along with things like ClamWin and OpenOffice), and I’ve still got room on the stick to load things like Norton’s Uninstaller or SP3.
With the BIOS and the OS categories already covered, that leaves the mystical magical “other”. Here’s where things get interesting, because the number of stand-alone tools - ones that operate outside of the OS - seems to grow every year. For years, all I kept in my CD stack was DBAN, because if it things were bad enough that I needed to wipe a PC and reinstall some software, DBAN certainly did the trick. Now, there are so many tools available, I’m almost intimidated. Here are a few that I either have or I plan to download and add to my kit in the near future:
These tools collectively give me the ability to check system memory, restore data, resize or recover partitions, back up or restore data, test hard drives, and on and on. Heck, Hiren’s disk does most of that stuff all by itself.
All of these tools are loaded on CD and packed in a portable case (or are loaded on a USB thumb drive) to be inserted in the shiny briefcase I’ll show you tomorrow when I summarize the project.
Related posts:
- Weekend Project: Ubergeeke’s Computer Repair Kit
- Ubergeeke’s Computer Repair Kit: What’s Next?
- Ubergeeke’s Repair Kit: Hardware
- Building A Troubleshooting Methodology
- Circuit Troubleshooting For Dummies
July 13th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
You should definitely check out the Hiren’s kit, it’s awesome. I actually usually carry half a dozen copies with me because they all tend to be “borrowed” from clients quite often.
Try out Hiren’s, you’ll love it.