Dos_Box Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 I don't know why, but last night several I just started to think about third party software that used to be so essential to how we did our jobs and now is either available for free, no longer needed or built into Windows. So, our starter for 10 is.... Partition Magic - Wanted to partition Windows on the fly without having to reinstall? Then Partition Magic was pretty much to only place you had to turn. Brought out by Symantec in the early 2000's from PowerQuest Corp it was discontinued in 2009. Diskeeper - Back in the NT 4.0 days Microsoft made a big song and dance about how NTFS never needed to be be defragged and as such didn't have a defragmenter built in. This was, of course guff and the only way you could pep us a NT 4.0 NTFS disk was by using Diskeeper. From Windows 2000 onwards each Windows version had its own built in defrag utility based on Diskeeper technologies! WinZip - Seriously is anyone using this still, or are we all on 7Zip now? So, what was on your essential tools list 'back-in-the-day'?
DalekSec Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 WinZip - Seriously is anyone using this still, or are we all on 7Zip now? Saw my brother using this yesterday was like "WHAOOOOOOOO I haven't seen that since 2010!" 4. Boot and nuke -> been replaced by a hammer 1
fairm010 Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 4. Boot and nuke -> been replaced by a hammer This. HDD's are being replaced with SSD's so they just get a hammer / drill bit to the platter.
sllorep Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 +1 for Ghost! Still got the boot floppy!! How about Daemon Tools or some form of virtual CDROM as Windows 8 onwards mounts ISO's itself. 2
strawberry Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Alcohol tools for mounting and managing isos. 1
Dos_Box Posted February 1, 2016 Author Posted February 1, 2016 Alcohol tools for mounting and managing isos. I'd forgotten about those!
mikeyd101 Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 sidekick+ laplink III norton change directory (ncd) Alchemy? not 100% on the name, was a command line graphic conversion tool. XMS? again not sure on the name was an expanded/extended memory manager.
zebulunn Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 How about Daemon Tools or some form of virtual CDROM as Windows 8 onwards mounts ISO's itself. Wow, I didn't know that....
jinnantonnixx Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 (edited) Laplink. Serial comms all those un-networked IBM AT machines. Magic! A treasured collection of IBM PS/2 reference disks, for those essential tasks on a model 50 Z. Norton utilities (boxed, with a picture of a crossed-armed Peter Norton), including defrag to sooth your OCD. Edited February 1, 2016 by jinnantonnixx
Dos_Box Posted February 1, 2016 Author Posted February 1, 2016 Poledit anyone For you youngsters, it was how we used to create policy files for Win 9x clients on NT4.0! 1
NB9457 Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Hiren's, still proves extremely useful today! 2
Duranis Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Think I still have some of my old toolkit disks around somewhere. Might have to dig them out and take a look. Norton ghost and partition magic were two of my most used. Considering this was back in the day when ISDN was the best most businesses had the most used "tool" disks I had was service packs/patches and drivers. Saved a ton of time waiting for things to download, nothing worse than having to do the XP SP2 on 20+ machines individually over 512kb internet connection. Burn in test was another one we used quite a bit to stress test machines that were having intermittent issues we couldn't recreate and was always run for 24 hours on any new builds we made.
DJ-1701 Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 (edited) The only one I can think of at the moment is akin to Ghost... PowerQuest Drive Image Pro Edited February 1, 2016 by DJ-1701
Boredguy Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Poledit anyone [ATTACH=CONFIG]34786[/ATTACH] For you youngsters, it was how we used to create policy files for Win 9x clients on NT4.0! Ah poledit was fun in those days. Think I might still have a Ghost boot disk kicking around somewhere. Daemon Tools for virtual CD's XTreeGold (Was perfect on our old 186 dumb network running Windows 3 to clear up the 20mb hard drive) FreeDos
Quackers Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Poledit anyone [ATTACH=CONFIG]34786[/ATTACH] For you youngsters, it was how we used to create policy files for Win 9x clients on NT4.0! This is poledit https://wiki.samba.org/images/c/c2/Poledit_folder_redirection.png thats the Group Policy MMC snap in trying to remember the name clients looked for was it config.pol and ntconfig.pol popped in the NETLOGON directory?
psydii Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Config.pol for 9x clients, ntconfig.pol for NT4 (and possibly 3.51?)
Arthur Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 (edited) Diskeeper Fun fact. Diskeeper Corporation was founded by a scientologist. I liked PerfectDisk better than Diskeeper. I can't remember why though. WinZip Before WinZip came along do you remember using DOS archivers like ARJ, LHA and/or PKZip? are we all on 7-Zip now? 7-Zip or Bandizip. I also have a lifetime license for WinRAR which I purchased in 2004 for £19.43 and still use today. That was excellent value for money! The only one I can think of at the moment is akin to Ghost... PowerQuest Drive Image Pro I used to use Drive Image Pro too. However, shortly after Symantec acquired PowerQuest I switched to Acronis True Image. Edited February 1, 2016 by Arthur
FN-GM Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Oh I remember the days when receiving the WinRAR warning that my trail has expired and then me just ignoring it. I had totally forgot about Ghost!
rad Posted February 1, 2016 Posted February 1, 2016 Windows 98 boot disk (on a floppy) to get you into dos before the OS kicked in
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