I just Became the proud owner of an alienware m11x. The machine is amazing, but I doesn’t come with a CD/DVD drive. So I had to come up with a way to access my DVDs and CDs on my new machine. After googling and talking to friends of mine I decided to create an ISO (which is a copy of the CD) and put the ISO file on my new laptop via an external hard drive transfer. Then I would have to use somewhere to run the ISO like it was a normal CD.

Moving back to the point of this post, I needed to wade through the internet’s crappiest free somewhere to find a good way to create a solid ISO file from CDs. That’s when I came across ISO Recorder. It’s a simple software that lets you rip the CD without launching some crappy software. You install it, then you can right right-click on your CD drive and click “create copy(ISO)”. Usually takes about 2-3 minutes. After that you have a clean CD image.

ISOrecoreder was created by alexfeinman and he shares it for free on his website. Also feel free to click on his donate button and buy him a beer for this great gem.

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Ccleaner is the real deal. It’s a free software that offers a lot of great computer cleaning tools. Ccleaner has become part of my routine when doing maintenance to computers. Here’s the CNET review:

Although it lacks a few of the bells and whistles found in other PC-cleaning applications, this free program offers more than enough features to make it a worthy download. CCleaner’s interface is logically designed and makes it easy to wipe away your tracks from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome from various Windows system areas, and from some third-party applications.

CCleaner doesn’t support the large number of extraneous programs that some competitors do, but it can erase traces from such popular programs as Spybot – Search & Destroy and WinZip. CCleaner now offers secure file erasing along with a Registry-cleaning utility that quickly scans for invalid entries before removing them. CCleaner can even back up your Registry before removal, in case it accidentally removes a crucial component, and the download includes a rudimentary feature for uninstalling any program on your machine.

Since this free application handles the majority of PC-cleaning chores and offers a nice extra, we strongly recommend CCleaner to all users, except those who need robust tools to remove supersensitive data.

Features:

1. Cleans out temp files for all browsers on your computer.
2. Cleans out temp data from software installations
3. Scans and fixes registry errors
4. Offers a faster way to view “add and remove programs” without having to use the slow working windows tool.
5. Allows you to quickly edit the startup software without having to access msconfig

I fully recommend this software to anyone to wants to have their computers running faster in no time.

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