I came across this Freeware CD/DVD burning app a few weeks ago and I must admit it's a high class piece of software. Nero Express has been my choice of burning software for some time but the bloatness that comes with it was starting to annoy me...all I want is something that will burn optical media and copy media either to another disk or preferably to an ISO image.

InfraRecorder checks all of those requirements without all of the extra crap that comes with Nero. The current version is 0.50 with 0.60 due out by the end of late 2009.
I encourage you to check this great app out and ditch your current burning software...you'll get a nice little burning affect when your using Vista aswell.

Official site is here.

The excellent password vault app Keepass has progressed from 2.07 beta to 2.08. This is a fantastic app for storing all of your passwords in the one secure place. Keepass uses the tried and tested security algorithms AES and Twofish to secure your password database where you can use a SHA256 encrypted masterpassword and also a keyfile to unlock it...as the Keepass site mentions not even quantum computers wont help you much in hacking the database.
There is also a very strong community base behind Keepass creating plugins and improving the source code...oh did I mention that Keepass is completely FREE!!...
Download the latest release from .

It's been acouple of months since the last post as I've been busy migrating mailboxes at work from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007....overall pretty successful project, but a lot of out of hours work required.
I don't pretend to be an Exchange guru, but I thought I would share some tips and tricks:

Eazy Tip 1: When you put in a new CAS box ensure to remove the self-signed cert that comes with it and replace it with your organisation's trusted cert for OWA. The powershell command is Remove-ExchangeCertificate and Import-ExchangeCertificate.

Eazy Tip 2: After telling Exchange about the new cert set the InternalURL for AutoDiscovery to prevent certificate errors being produced by Outlook 2007 when it launches. The powershell command is Set-ClientAccessServer -AutoDiscoverServiceInternalUri, there are acouple of other commands to set but that one is key.

Eazy Tip 3: You need to be at a min patch level of Exchange SP1 to be able to export mailboxes to PST files, but you can't do that from an actual Exchange server. So this tip is have an XP machine with all of the Exchange pre-reqs installed and the 32 bit version of the Exchange Management Tools plus Outlook handy during your migration so you can dump mailboxes into PST files. I created a script to do this here.

Eazy Tip 4: All outlook clients should be Outlook 2007, this will save you so much time and effort. Outlook 2007 makes use of the autodiscovery service running on your CAS boxes to find where the user's mailbox is located, no more going around to the user's PC and manually configuring their client....joy....

Eazy Tip 5: Finally go and get on courses 5047, 5049 and 5050 and get the basic knowledge on how to work with the Exchange servers. It's the best email / comms solution by far and by having that basic knowledge of how to use them will go a long way when you're planning and carrying out a migration.

Here are some great online Exchange resources:

• MSExchange.org
• Exchange Team Blog
• Technet

I came across portable apps...that is apps that run directly from a USB drive, a few years ago. But at the time the selection of apps was limited. Acouple of days ago I revisited the Portable Apps site and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the selection of apps has increased and now includes some really handy apps.


The selection of apps now range from:

• 7-zip
• Notepad++
• WinSCP
• Toucan

A number of these apps and a few more are now happily living of my USB HDD, check out the Portable Apps site here I'm sure you'll find something useful to whack on your USB stick.

My search for the best software personal firewall is over (I hope). After spending what must of been well over a year on Zone Alarm I finally had enough of it's resource hogging ways and turfed it. Don't get me wrong Zone Alarm certainly does the job, what annoyed the hell out of me was the CPU smashing at boot time when loading up the desktop and the way over use of my RAM.

The hunt for a software firewall of my liking has been an ongoing affair since changing my ADSL router which resulted in it not being able to talk correctly with my hardware based firewall mOnO wall.

With the uninstall of Zone Alarm of I went to the downloads section of CNet (a must if your looking for software). Where I stumbled across Comodo in somebody's review post, a quick google told me all I needed to know.

This is by far the best free firewall on the net, very easy to setup and customise to my liking, very low on resources at the time of writing it's only using 12MB of RAM and most importantly it's strong. On a number of leak tests that are designed to by-pass a firewall the Comodo firewall performed amazingly well straight out of the box. Read here to review the leak tests.

In short, if you're not using this firewall to protect your home machine your leaving yourself wide open...get it now.

All though new in my eyes, Raxco have been putting out a disk defragmentation app for some time but this is the first version I've used and I tell you what it's fantastic. Being an avid user of Diskeeper Pro for some time I thought I was on a winner untill Raxco PD rocked up. I was amazed at how much more through and more brutal it was in defragging my hard drives. Raxco use a paten SMARTPlacement process over a single pass to ensure your drives are defragged to the best they can be. Click here to see a comparison between Diskeeper and Raxco PD 7....it might surprise you.

A good friend of mine found this web base app, Spiceworks is the ideal tool for monitoring your network. I've tried this at home and found it very easy to use (remember your firewall's!), although not using it to it's full potentional, I did find that it threw some really use full info at me. So if you're in an enterprise environment with plenty of workstations and servers this is for you.
Download it here.