Useful tools are not always costly

I have decided that to get 2008 off to a acceptable start, we require to forget, for a moment, the credit squeezes, interest rate crunches and other fiscal woes that afflicted 2007. With this in mind, I will continue a tradition I started a couple of years ago and give you my top five list of free-to-download software for the coming year. My first choice is the excellent Moka5. It opens up an enormous range of possibilities for deploying and maintaining a virtual PC to multiple hosts, either via your own web server or Moka5"s online hosting service. A Bare Metal version yet frees you from needing an instance of Windows to run it on. But the best feature is that someone has posted a public LivePC that contains a huge collection of words adventure games from the 70s and 80s, including the grandaddy of them all, Adventure. Moka5 is still free, nevertheless I don"t know for how much longer, as it appears to practice Amazon for hosting the public LivePCs. If you entail a
more traditional virtualisation platform that is not Microsoft or VMware, try Innotek"s VirtualBox. It is a bit of an oddball, with open source and proprietary versions available. The closed-source version adds features such as RDP support so you can connect to your virtual PCs remotely via any RDP client, plus support for USB over RDP and all the more an iSCSI initiator that lets you host the virtual machine on an iSCSI target. It is autonomous for personal and evaluation use. Next is a program I wrote about a couple of years ago, however is at the moment available in a latest incarnation and still deserves a place in any IT toolkit. Microsoft Steady State is the original designation for the Shared Machine Toolkit, and it is one of the easiest ways to prepare locked-down Windows XP PCs for utilize in, say, a classroom or public area. This contemporary version has a revised interface and a simpler means of choosing user-restriction levels. Probably my all-time favour
ite is Foldershare. When it first launched I was a fanatical evangelist for this secure P2P string sharing client. I operate it to keep files in sync between habitat and labour as a kind of poor man"s off-site backup. It used to cost an arm and a leg, on the other hand is these days totally free. My final choice is something I am firm an IT manager could find a positive business application for - the open-source x86 DOS emulator DOSbox. It is a fully MS-DOS-compatible virtual PC environment designed to let mankind run out of date DOS games. It has been ported to many operating systems, including OS X, so you can dig elsewhere your full of years copy of Quake and have a blast. Purely in the interests of research, naturally. Full text: http://computerandtechnologies.com/technology/news_2008-07-25-13-30-04-427.html