This little utility can be used to display whole bunch of information about your hard/cd/dvd/usb drives. Here are the main features at a glance:

• Display a list of all partitions and drives;
• Mapped drive letters;
• CD-ROM/DVD Drive info and capabilities;
• CD/DVD Media info;
• “Subst” i.e. assign a drive letter to a folder;
• Drive details like Vendor, Serial Number, etc.
• Portable – just one executable;
• Benchmarks;

Version Reviewed: 4.10

Home Page: Drive Manager

Here are the main features:

• Fast, simple and intuitive user interface;
• Data is presented as a clickable TreeMap;
• Powerful filtering by size, tag, name, etc.
• Adjust level of details displayed on the screen;
• Portable – no installation needed – just a single executable;
• Drill up and down in the data;
• Export to text file of the selected results;

SpaceSniffer is pretty fast (I have about 200GB out of 640GB taken on my hard drive and the scan took about 1.5 minutes).

Version Reviewed: 1.1.2.0

Works on Windows 2000+ including Windows 7

• Kaspersky - about 100MB and my personal favorite used on the computers at my home: Download Kaspersky Rescue CD. The disk is Linux Kaspersky 2008 engine based and features virus definitions update function, which is very important, so you don’t have to build the rescue cd every time the virus definitions change.
  Note: If you own 2009 KAV or KIS you can build such a disk yourself directly from the Kaspersky interface.
  
• BitDefender – about 228MB. Download BitDefender Rescue CD 2.0 . It is also a linux based solution. Similarly to Kaspersky it offers automatic virus definitions update. Also a very good antivirus. Another nice feature is that the CD includes a memory test (Memtest86+), which is a nice addition.
  
• VBA32 – abot 75MB. Download VBA32 Rescue Live CD. I recently stumbled across this rescue CD. Linux based and has a text mode interface. The small download size makes it useful and also can update virus signatures from internet.
  
• Avira AntiVir – about 45MB. Download Avira AntiVir Rescue CD. An excellent antivirus, also linux based rescue CD. Its small size allows very fast boot and download, although it doesn’t support online signatures update. Another nice feature is that it comes as an executable, that burns itself to a CD or writes an .iso image. Avira also offer a free antivirus system to install on your computer.
  
• F-Secure – about 222MB. Again a Linux based Rescue CD. Donwload F-Secure Rescue CD 3.01. Good antivirus system, but a very large download file. It also features virus signatures update over internet, so you’d only need to download it once.
  

Hopefully this information will help you the next time your computer gets infected. I would rather try more than one antivirus in such case, instead of relying on just one. All things considered all of the above are very good products, so take your pick.

Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.

• Show network properties (SSID, Mac address, channel, strength, etc.);
• Works well on Vista and WindowsXP 64;
• It can graph signal strength over time;

Overall a very useful program to have installed on your laptop and a great replacement for NetStumbler, which does not work on Vista.

• Main Interface to help remove and immunize (similar to SpywareBlaster) against malware and other useful tools;
• TeaTimer – to protect from unintended registry and system settings changes;
• SDHelper – to provide active protection against bad downloads in Internet Explorer;

Main Useful Features:

• Scans and removes various malwares;
• Provides immunization (which can be complemented with SpywareBlaster);
• System startup editor;
• Can be scheduled to do a system scan on system startup;
• Automatic updates of the program and malware database.

Excellent and strongly recommended tool in the battle against spyware. Of course using Mozilla Firefox also would decrease the chance of getting spyware .

Useful features:

• Protection against a large variety of spyware;
• No process to keep running and slow down your computer;
• Automatic updates of the malware database;
• Protection against ActiveX and unwanted cookies.

Overall a very nice and useful program. The makers provide regular database updates. The only very minor issue I have found is that when a new version is released the program doesn’t auto-update itself. Well worth a download and use.

Windows Password Recovery Tools

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (Bootdisk/CD) is a bootable disk to help you reset a windows logon password to any local user account and can help unlocking a locked account. You need to reboot your system in order to use it and boot from the provided CD image. It works somewhat like ERD Commander’s password change tool.

LCP – User account auditing and password recovery. Supports dictionary, brute-force and hybrid attacks. Very nice program similar to @stake’s tool L0phtCrack, but free.

ophcrack – It is a windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is an extremely fast processing, even though it may not find the password and I had a hard time to make it work, while installed locally. They also provide a bootable cd, which is easier to work with…

Office Password Recovery Tools

Shatterock Database Password Sleuth – Helps you to recover passwords from Microsoft Access Databases 95-2002 (.mdb).

Word/Excel Password Recovery Wizard – This seems to be a nice one for recovering Word and Excel passwords.

BIOS Password Recovery Tools

BIOS Central provides some utilities allowing you to reveal BIOS passwords. Most of those are kind of complicated to use or DOS based, but I have not found any others…

Multifunctional Password Recovery Tools

Cain & Abel is a comprehensive windows password recovery and analysis tool. It allows decoding stored password from several windows utilities (like CISCO VPN Client profiles, RDP stored passwords, etc.). It can show cached passwords like dial-up, protected storage, IE7, wireless networking, and others passwords.

Cain also contains a network sniffer for a variety of protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SMB, ICQ, TDS and others), allowing recovering network services passwords. The Password cracker can help you decode variety of hashes as well. It has many other features like recording VOIP conversations, revealing password boxes, cracking encrypted passwords using brute-force, dictionary attacks, etc.

Overall it is an easy to use software to help network administrators improve security.

NirSoft Password Recovery Tools are a nice, small, easy to use and portable utilities to recover password for different windows applications. Here is a list:

• MessenPass – Can show stored passwords for several IM programs (ICQ Lite, MSN/Windows/Live Messenger, Yahoo, Google Talk, Miranda, GAIM, etc.).
• Mail PassView – Reveals stored password from various e-mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, IncrediMail, Outlook and Outlook Express, etc.
• IE PassView – Reveals passwords, stored by IE 4.0+
• Protected Storage PassView – Shows passwords and autocomplete information, stored by IE, MSN Explorer, Outlook Express.
• Asterisk Logger – This utility can reveal passwords stored behing asterisks in standard text boxes.
• Network Password Recovery – Can help you recover MSN/Windows messenger, stored LAN share passwords, IE7 Basic or Digest Authentication stored passwords
• PstPassword – recovers password from Outlook 97+ .pst files.
• WirelessKeyView – Recovers WEP/WPA keys, stored by windows’ Wireless Zero Configuration service.
• Remote Desktop PassView – can help you determine passwords, stored by Remote Desktop Utility in the .rdp files.

SIW is a portable application, so it is suitable to add to and run from your USB memory stick to have it handy anywhere you go.