Ten essential items for your IT Tool Box

When I was gainfully employed I would travel around the state I live in fixing computers. I had a backpack full of things such as hand tools, floppies, cd's, a external optical drive, a external hard drive, various cables, assorted parts, and of course a laptop. That backpack weighed over seventeen pounds. (I weighed it an airport scale when I was flying to a distant city).

Now most of that software is on pen drives, ten or so that have almost every flavor of Operating System I can think of... (even Linux).

What do you have to work on your computer? What about your software?

What is in your backpack or what every you carry with you to fix computers?

Some screw drivers, a couple of wrenches, maybe some torx drivers, anti-static wrist strap, and so on.

Hummm, oh ya, an anti-static wrist strap is a strap that goes around your wrist that has unique qualities that absorbs electricity. The strap also has a long coiled insulated wire and an alligator clip to attach the cable to a ground point such as the computer case.

That is for hardware, what about the software?

Such as the Operating System for backup, recovery, or repair?

Such a device could be a CD, DVD, or a usb flash drive, also known as an ERD - Emergency Repair Disk.

In the Information Technology world that would be known as an IT Tool Box plus some newer jargon it is a Kit.

What does an IT Tool Box (Kit) have in it?

• Bootable Floppy (if you still have a floppy drive).
• Bootable CD/DVD
• Bootable USB Drive (Pen/flash or external hard drive)

What do these bootable media have on them?

The floppy can't have very much because of the size of the storage.

The CD/DVD/USB can have a lot of useful utilities such as:

• File manager
• Password unlock/changer program
• Imaging software
• Regedit
• Disk Management program
• In the case of ERD Commander: System Manager
• Anti virus/spyware/trojan/malware programs
• BartPe boot CD
• Windows 7 ERD (Emergency Repair Disc)

GUI (Graphics User Interface) vs. the command line:

Troubleshoot, repair, maintain, upgrade & secure...     With this!

Command line is what you would get with the CMD button when using Windows 7, this is the same as starting XP and using the F6/F8 key to get to the "Safe Mode" and repair menu.

The GUI gives you a more intuitive mouse or pointer environment to use programs but the command line is text driven and some of the commands take a lot of understanding of the OS, this is called syntax, the writing of the command in as few words or letters as possible.

And a host of other things you may need to repair/recover a dead Operating System or backup your OS/data.

Now that XP is "officially" dead as in Microsoft has discontinued support for the Operating System and we now have the third kludge to replace it (Windows 8.1) you need a bootable repair disk that you can add programs you need to fix those kludge Operating Systems.

Here is a tutorial that guides you through the process of making a Custom Emergency Repair Disk tailored to your specific environment.