5 IT Tools You Should Be Using If You Aren’t Already!
As IT professionals, most of us are constantly looking for tools that can help us do our jobs better and more efficiently. Below, I’ve listed five tools I use that you might find useful. Most of these tools are ideal for SMBs and some have both free and paid versions. I’d love to hear your feedback on these tools and any others that you would recommend!
Acronis True Image – is a disk imaging tool that restores previously captured images to another disk, replicating the structure and contents to the new disk, also allowing disk cloning and partition resizing, even if the new disk is of different capacity. It’s easy-to-use, quite intuitive and can be booted from a CD – a really great product. Several editions are available. There is a free trial and paid commercial versions.
Notepad++ – is a source code editor and a replacement for Windows text editor Notepad, and it supports a variety of programming and scripting languages. One of the benefits over Notepad is that it supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files, while opening large files significantly faster. It also features syntax highlighting and syntax folding, bracket matching and macro recording and execution. Very user-friendly. Free.
UltraVNC – is an open-source application for the Microsoft Windows operating system that uses VNC protocol to control another computer remotely over a network connection. It also supports file transfers, chat functionality and various authentication methods. I’ve found it to be a stable, great solution that just does what it’s supposed to do when you want it to. UltraVNC is free but RealVNC which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and UNIX-like systems is a paid version and well worth the cost.
PuTTY – is an open-source secure telnet client for the Windows and UNIX platforms. It’s a great tool to connect to remote computers over secured telnet sessions. I find it a particularly useful utility especially since it supports several network protocols including SCP, Telnet and rlogin. Free.
VIPRE Rescue – is a command-line utility that will scan and clean an infected computer that has reached the point where the operating system is not working properly. I’ve found it to be very useful because it can be booted by disk if the computer is infected and gotten to the point where I can’t do anything with it. Also, if a computer is already running VIPRE and a virus has disabled it, the program can still be run to clean the computer. There are both free and paid versions.
