Free Tools Anyone?

There's GIMP (hate the name, love the software), a great photo/image editor that offers all the key features found in a commercial application. Another favorite is Open Office, which does a decent job of emulating Microsoft Office at a price that can't be beat. Firefox and Thunderbird round out the list.

While I'm sure most everyone knows about the above programs, there are a slew of utilities available that can make life a lot easier for VARs servicing their clients. Here's a list of favorites that I use in the lab.

At the top is Netstumbler (www.netstumbler.com), a utility for monitoring wireless networks that proves to be a great tool for VARs doing wireless site surveys. Statbar (www.statbar.nl) is another useful utility that monitors a system's performance, a quick and easy way to help figure out what those performance-hogging applications are. Need to drill down into the processes running on a PC? Well, Process Explorer from Sysinternals (www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html) does just that and is a great tool for finding "unknown processes" used by malware. For those times when you need to know almost everything about a system you are troubleshooting, SIW (System Information for Windows) packs a real punch and can be run off a USB key drive. You can find it at www.gtopala.com.

What's going on in the network? NADetector (www.nsauditor.com/network_monitoring/nadetector_traffic_analyzer.html) offers an easy-to-use, comprehensive list of traffic on the network, including ports in use and IP addresses. To delve deeper into the network and take a look at what's what give Look@LAN Network Monitor a try (www.lookatlan.com). The product offers a nice graphical view and even detects the operating systems in use.

When it comes to PCs, a picture is worth a thousand words, so a good screen capture utility is key. I really like Gadwin Printscreen (http://www.gadwin.com) for creating snapshots of the screen.

All of these little utilities have become must-haves for me, but I am sure there are hundreds more that I haven't touched on. What are your favorites?

Free to be you and me. Send along your list of must-have utilities to [email protected].