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Working on PCs since the days of The Shat selling VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker hair you learn that its the little things that can make your day sooo much easier. From WSUS Offline allowing you to update any version of Windows via DVD or flashstick (as well as having your own Windows Update on a network drive) to Ninite allowing you to install most of the "must have" third party software without any toolbars and fully unattended by simply checking the boxes, its the little tools that really take out the drudgery. Tools like Driver Booster to get rid of the always "fun" driver hunt for old or weird hardware drivers or Comodo Cleaning Essentials to get rid of bugs take out the work for the Fixit guy or those that end up stuck doing the job for their family.
With this in mind allow me to introduce a tool many here may not have heard of which can be extremely nice to have, WinSetupFromUSB or as I like to call it "Every OS in my pocket". Do not let the name fool you, this tool works with not only Windows but also Linux ISOs and even preinstall environments like BartPE or the Linux based recovery environments used by many disc imagers like Paragon B&R Free. So with this one tool you can install OSes, run different Live CDs, restore backups using recovery CDs, all from a single flashstick, VERY handy.
So I hope these little tools help somebody out there stuck doing the "family IT GUY" role and I hope to learn in return what tools do YOU use to make your life easier? What tricks and little pieces of software do you use to make your day run smoother? I'm sure with as many different walks of life represented here we can make this a most enlightening and informative post!
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:05AM
YMMV, but for my personal use, I like the virtual machine approach (I use VirtualBox in Linux) because it's much easier to back up and restore the disk images and your config. If your disk goes bad, you just rsync the backups to the new disk and keep going. It's also much easier to take a snapshot if you think you're going to do something that might trash an OS, since all you have to do it copy the disk images. I'm not a big fan of partitions. I ran out of room in a VM last week and just gave a command and doubled my disk size instantly. That's hard to do with a partition. Backing up partitions is a pain.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)