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Posts Tagged ‘Freeware’

As we all know, you can’t just throw any old image onto any computer. This isn’t Windows 98. So, you’ve probably got a fairly large collection of images, specially made for every model computer you have. While this certainly works, it’s not easy or efficient. Last time I checked, we had at least 70 different images, almost filling a 180 gigabyte drive. Simply unnacceptable. Microsoft supplies a set of deployment tools for system administrators, to help make their lives a little easier. In particular, they provide us with a handy little program called SysPrep; it allows us to prepare any…

Who knew transcription gear was so expensive!  Not only expensive; complicated!  What is a poor doctoral student to do?  We neither have the time to learn a complicated device nor the money to afford devices that range between $200 upwards to $600, much less afford to hire someone to do it for us.  We here at the TLC started thinking: Why does this have to be so hard?  Most of the technology needed for transcription is already in your everyday computer. All that is needed is a foot pedal to control it as you would any other transcriber.  And as…

Overview IrfanView (pronounced Ear-Fan-View) is a freeware program (for non-commercial use) developed by Irfan Skiljan, a Bosnian developer presently residing in Austria. ‘Simple enough for beginners and powerful enough for professionals,’ this program supports tasks and formats that not even many commercially available image viewers can.1 If you’d like to download or simply learn more about this program, visit www.irfanview.com. That said, IrfanView is deployed across campus for the purpose of viewing, manipulating and optimizing images and other media. Using the Interface Perhaps one of the best features about this program is its deceptive simplicity. Unlike other image viewers that…

We try to keep the images for our machines up to date, but sometimes it’s just best to start from a fresh installation. But, until recently, “fresh installation” meant using our site license for XP SP1, and spending 2 hours running updates. And unless I could find an external floppy drive, I could forget about installing Windows on a SATA machine. But with nLite, none of this is a problem. nLite is a freeware program that allows you to create a customized installation disk for Windows. You can add updates and service packs, custom drivers and patches, and even remove…

(This article has been updated for version 0.27 Let me know what you think!) Every school, even a small classroom lab, needs a means to efficiently reinstall their workstations from the ground up: operating system, applications, settings, etc. That is, essentially restoring the machine to a pristine state before it became contaminated by actually being used by students (gives me shivers).  Sadly, in many schools, this process is anything but efficient and sometimes involves a couple of teachers going around and reinstalling the machines one at a time. They may well know there’s a better way, they just might not know how. Using…