What programs should a tech carry?

[AlienDyne]

Hi everybody.

I've read Windrivers' opinion about What A Good Tech Should Carry.
I've decided to make a CD (or two) containing the most needed programs for a tech.

What's YOUR opinion?

Any reply would be much appreciated.
Thank you all in advance...




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When a good one meets some of the best...
I've died and gone to heaven!

[ReBoot]

Here's my $.02
Disk Manager, multiple CD-ROM drivers, including mscdex.exe, HD-tach, CD-tach, TweakUI, Winzip, DOS 6.22 boot with sys.com, fdisk, edit. PKunzip for DOS. Scandisk for DOS and Windows.
This list could conceiveably cover 3 or 4 CD's, but this will do for now.

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Who needs a life, I have Internet!
www.nineworlds.net

[lysergic]

On daily service calls I carry what is listed above (cd burned with boot disks and other useful things like IE3,4,5 netscape, AOL, etc) a cd of all the win95 cabs for each revision and all updates on one disc, 98, 98SE, and upg on another. A boot floppy with cdrom drivers (a 98 boot disk works great gets most drives), a virus scan floppy, microscope, a y2k test floppy (hey, its $75 a pop when they want an upgrade board), and finally 2 cds packed full of drivers that have been collected over a couple of years. And it is also a good idea to take an extra cd rom for all those wonderful old drives that dont like burned discs...

[Nick Wightkin]

EZ drive is always a plus.

I made a COMMAND dir on my tech cd. inside, i make a dir named win95a, win95b...and so on..then copy the appropriate command files to each. such as format, and fdisk and xcopy....

this way, if i ever forget to put a dos 6.22 file on a boot disk, i can just copy from that cd.

one program that i have found to be really handy is FImage.exe and FWrite.exe.

using fimage, you can insert a premade boot disk into the floppy, and create an image file of it. do this for all your important floppies, and store them, along with fwrite.exe onto a cd. then, with fwrite, you can transfer that image to a floppy.

advantage?...you can create a boot disk, while running another operating system.
ie...you forgot your win98 boot disk at home, but need to create one using dos 5.0

after i do more work to the program, i will probably give away the program and source code as freeware...

a good dos based antivirus prog is handy.

-Nick

[3fingersalute]

I burned a handy little cd for all my techs at our store, and on it I put the WIN95 directory from the 95 upgrade, another from 95 full, another from 95 OSR2, and then the same thing w/98 upgrade and oem version. I also included the I386 directory from the NT 4.0 cd and then a couple of little things like the USB supplement, dial-up networking upgrade, etc. This cd has proved to be priceless at times, ie. when you get out onsite 30 miles from your store and go to install something into the customer's system and it needs the OS cd, or need to do a re-install, well you know 9 out of 10 times the customer doesn't have it, so then you have them all right there with you on one cd!


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[email protected]

[rusabus]

I have been maintaining a Store CD for the tech department where I work. Currently, we are in our 4th edition . The one we use now is bootable, has a boot menu with the following options:

Command prompt only
IDE CD support
IDE and SCSI CD support
Parallel Zip drive support
Parallel Zip drive, IDE and SCSI CD support
Windows 98 setup from CD

(details on how to do the bootable CD thing are available at www.bootdisks.com)

The rest of the CD looks something like this:
Patches
Intel Patch Directory:
810, 440's, 430 TX INF update
Pre-OSR2 Busmaster
USB (use first for AGP)
Microsoft win95 patches
Microsoft win98 patches
DUN update
ie updates
media player
outlook express updates
JAVA VM update
outlook express y2k update
VIA Patches and Drivers
4 in 1 driver
PCI Bridge Patch USE FIRST
USB Filter Driver For 98 Only

directx 6.1

Benchmarking
audio winbench
final reality

BIOS Info (including a list of all known bios ID codes)
ID programs

Boot Disks
98
98 SE
950A
950B
950A\With IDE CD support
950B\With IDE CD support
98\With IDE and SCSI CD support
98\With IDE CD support
98 SE\With IDE and SCSI CD support
98 SE\With IDE CD support
DOS\5.0
DOS\6.0
DOS\6.22\basic
DOS\6.22\With IDE CD support

Generic Drivers
CD-ROM Drivers
mouse driver for dos
Zip drive
Zip drive\dos

Miscellaneous Programs
acrobat reader 4.0
alexa
Atomic Clock Program
IE4.01
IE5
Microsoft Speech SDK
Netscape 4.61
NetZero
Plus95
Real player G2
updates.com
EZ-CD creator update

Utilities
BCM Diagnostics win9x
CD-R and CD-RW diag util
CPU speed identifier
EZ-Drive
GHOST
hex editor
Internet Tech Diagnostic
low level format utility
Microsoft registry cleaner
Modem WAN setup guide
MotherBoard Monitor 4.01
Norton Anti Virus Scanner
Partion Magic 4.0
power tweak trial
registry repair tools
Sandra freeware
SoftFSB
tweak bios
visual basic runtimes
winzip
y2k tester

Win98 FE
Win95 OSR 2.1


The idea is that you can use this CD to setup a new system, or repair a broken one. One note: to make the CD bootable, your long file names are restricted to 30 characters, and you will not be able to access dirs that have long names unless you are in windows (dos prompt in windows or windows explorer)
also, no two sub dirs or file names in the same dir can start off with the same 8 characters. Filenames in DOS are truncated, but don't have the 123456~1.123 123456~2.123 format, the file 1234567890.123 would appear in DOS as 12345678.123. this is why they aren't accessable unless windows is running.

Our store CD has about 590 megs of stuff on it. Pretty sweet!!!