DBAN – Wipe that hard drive for good! Upgrading your hard drive or selling an old one to a friend? DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke) is a nice small program that can make that process a whole lot easier. This software is particularly useful for people who are planning on selling their old HD’s. When you find a buyer you really don’t know you are taking a huge risk by just selling them your hard drive even after you have reformatted it to a fresh copy of windows. When you go to reformat the hard drive you may be under the impression that you have deleted everything but you haven’t all that information can still be accessed by the next user of the hard drive. If you use DBAN it will completely remove every piece of information from the hard drive so you can protect yourself from fraud and other e-crimes that could easily arise without using a simple small floppy drive to take care if it for you.

Autoit3 is a great basic-like scripting tool for Windows GUI Automation. Using the power of windows API’s you can easily write a script that simulate keystrokes, ( also combined like CTRL-ALT+CANC , CTRL-Z , ALT-F3 …) mouse movements and clicks. Latest versions include a easy GUI builder for give more interface automation to the user. Script can be saved and run via AutoIt or compiled ( in a very small exe! ) for redistribution. This tool save my life many time, especially when you need a fast, reliable, small solution.

Feedburner (http://feedburner.com) is a free and useful service for RSS feed owners. Feedburner automatically adds features to the feeds your software already produces, with very little work on your part. The most useful feature is collection and presentation of readership statistics. Wondering how many people read your feed on a regular basis? You may have many readers who seldom visit your web site. Feedburner provides unique subscriber counts as well as breakdowns by attributes such as client or host site.

Another useful feature for promotions is the ability to embed your latest posts — dynamically — in your email signature or other location. Feedburner provides a simple snippet of HTML that you can add to your outgoing email signature; this dynamically pulls the content from your feed whenever someone views the email — a great stealth marketing tool Finally, Feedburner has recently added the ability to embed ads within your feeds. If you are looking to monetize your work directly, this is a great option to experiment with. Getting started with Feedburner is easy and the web site guides you through the process with plenty of examples. You can see your feed in Feedburner before switching it on for your subscribers, so you can ensure that things look the way you want to before making the switch to your site’s subscribe link.

Windows Server 2008 is available in four different flavors: 32 Bit Business, 64 Bit Business, 32 Bit Enterprise, and 64 Bit Enterprise.

Windows Server 2008 is based on Windows Vista. The installation procedure is not any different than that of Vista. The standard server install does not come with Aero, Wifi and sound enabled, however, these, and many more features can be activated with ease. The OS in general is much more stable than Vista, with fewer driver issues, and almost no BSODs. It is noticeably faster and takes just 25 seconds for a complete bootup on a 2.16 ghz Intel core 2 duo with 1gb of ram. The computer hangs less often and is a joy to use. However, some features such as shutdown event logger have to be disabled because they are extremely annoying. It can be installed for free with a grace period of 60 days extendable to 240 days legally. It is a very stable OS and a pleasure to use, unlike Vista, Microsoft has got this one right.

PDFCreator is a neat little program to create PDFs from other sources, such as Word documents. PDFs can be created from within the document by printing to the PDF file, or by simply right-clicking on the file within a folder. Available to use for free, this nifty package allows for quick PDF creation with minimal fuss and effort, and allows the addition of simple metadata to ‘tag’ the document. PDFCreator is available on sourceforge.net.

OpenOffice set to take on Microsoft Office. Tired of paying an outrageous price for Microsoft Office? OpenOffice has provided a free alternative office suite. OpenOffice comes complete with a word processor, spreadsheet application, slideshow creator, and much more. All the tools are compatible with Microsoft Office document formats, and the entire suite can be obtained free of charge. In even better news, Microsoft is now adopting the OpenOffice document format as defaults for new versions of Office, ensuring future compatibility. From our extensive use here at Myzips.com, we have found that the applications are extremely compatible with Office, and work very well as a replacement. You can download it today at http://www.openoffice.org. Versions are available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux/UNIX.