My Favorite USB Tools

  As any self-respecting IT pro, I carry a USB drive around with me almost constantly, and I have many tools on there that I rely on regularly.  One thing I see and hear a lot from colleges are what tools should they have available on a USB?  Well, here is a list of the software I use on a regular basis.

Hiren's Boot CD [link]

   This is the first tool I setup on my USB drive.  Well.. it's first because it basically has to be.  To get Hiren's on a USB drive, it means formatting it and setting it up for a computer to recognize it as a boot medium (link).  I use Hiren's because it has a ton of tools I can use to fix a computer.  The tools I use most often is Parted Magic and the Offline Password tool.  There are a bunch more, but those are the ones I use most often.  Also, you can use quite a few of Hiren's tools on Windows as well.  You can access those tools at: \HBCD\HBCDMenu.exe

KeePass [link]

   My go to for password management.  This was the first software I came across for password management (about six years ago now) and haven't had any interest in changing.  I have a copy of my database on my home computer and carry it around on my USB.  That way, no matter where I am, I can get access to whatever site I need to.  I also use this to help manage password for any company specific sites too, of course the database for that stays at work and on a server so it's backed up.

Notepad++ [link]

   I got started with Notepadd++ when I did a lot of manual HTML development for websites.  With it's support for a ton of languages, it offers the ever-so-handy syntax highlighting.  While I don't do much manual HTML development, I still use it to read a lot of documents as well as work with a lot of server files for my Minecraft servers.  It's lightweight, offers a lot of plugins to expand it's features, and is just so damn handy on a USB.

BAT to EXE Converter [link]

   While I don't use this as much as I used to, I wanted to include it because it is such a handy tool and can solve some problems that you may have with scripting.  When I was younger, I wanted to develop a lot of custom scripts to handle a lot of common tasks.  A lot of that was VBS, but I found that in some cases, I couldn't call VBS directly, I had to do it with a Batch file.  Sometimes, I wanted to give my scripts a custom icon or make it hidden to the users.  This software will allow that.  You can even combine a bunch of scripts into one file to make it easy to move around.

7 Zip [link]

   Why someone still uses WinRAR, I have no idea as 7zip does everything it can do and more... all without bugging you to buy it!  I have this on my USB to work with archives as well as a file explorer.  While I don't use it as a file explorer much, it is a reliable one to use just in case.  As an archiver, it's brilliant.  It's even able to make encrypted and password protected archives.

RocketDock [link]

   Another obscure piece of software, but one I've used a long time.  While there are other options for a USB launcher, I like RocketDock as it's completely customizable and straightforward.  RocketDock can be expanded with a bunch of plugins developed by it's community and a lot of custom fancy scripts or special Windows commands.  The who look can be anything you want it to be like the OSX dock or like the one I use below.

   That is it for this list, as these are either the most common tools I use, or ones that are a bit obscure that most don't know about.  If you'd like me to continue this and talk about more of the tools I use, let me know in the comments below!

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