Steve Gibson is a good man. He has his detractors, but all genius comes at a price.
SpinRite is an absolute must have application.
i can also vouch for him and his freeware and products...
he is a great person, but sometimes seems to overreact on some issues, but the reason is because he thinks of the worst case scenario, and it better that way than to ignore it (as you know this is security thread and as such am referring to his talk about security)...
i also listen his podcast's on security which really do break it down nicely and it makes very easy to understand some difficult to understand usually one hour or less (the big 3: network and encryption and virtualization get series of podcasts because they are big subjects...
)
the point that i am trying to make (and im pretty sure he is too) is that you can never be too careful with security, and should usually prepare for the worst...
as for spinrite i also believe this is a must have....
i am waiting actually to buy a site license so that i can use it officially on other computers i work on....
Wow. Checked their
Demo Video, Thankz Antz, Thats One Cool Neat Application. Yup, But wish it had some trial specs like minimalized usage or something so we can see whats there. It seems worthy for $89. Wish I had that much. As you said it surely is good for Cooperate sector and Many Home users.
shields up has been there for a
long time now and is with leaktest one of the first firewall testing tools available to the public
there are only two caveats and the only one i can actually would like to have...
i would want to have a setting where you lower how many samples it needs to try to recover a sector (sometimes 2000 is way too many, especially with many corrupted sectors it
IS time consuming [in my experience both my c and d were corrupted and while my C took only 2 days to finish, my d drive was to be expected to finish in 458 days, yes there that many sectors corrupted, well in its defense the reason is because i left my bag unintended and well lets just say it fell 3 feet on the floor and it was better to just replace it using my warranty....:shock:]
the second caveat is how its still built around dos (its actually the only dos application i use now, well appart from win 3.11 + apps...
) which means EFI and other architectures are not supported...
Steve himself said that 6.1 will change it so that it is bios independent (meaning it will not dependent on bios for actions as data transfer and hard drive recognition....)
