Guide:IT Toolbox Part 1 - The ULTIMATE External hardrive

[Neodude1123201]

So - Im going to be doing a series on building the ultimate IT Toolbox.Wether you need if for fixing a friends or computer or you want to start your own PC Repair business,This toolbox will get you out of trouble!

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IT Toolbox - The Ultimate External Hardrive

Why do you need an external hardrive for an IT Toolbox? Well External hardrives are perfect for:

-Backing up customers data
-Storing Diagnostic hardware that can be used to diagnose the customers PC
-Storing software that the customer might benefit from
-Storing the latest Updates and drivers

This guide will show you how to build the ultimate hardrive and then show you some software you might want to store on there!

1.Selecting the perfect drive

Before we get started,you are going to need an external hardrive! A good place to get on would be:

(US) http://www.newegg.com/
(UK) http://www.misco.co.uk/
(Australia) http://www.mwave.com.au/newAU/mwaveAU/default.asp
(Other) http://www.ebay.com

Before you buy one,we need to consider a few things first:

-Size (Data wise)
-Powered or Non-Powered
-Size (Physical)

Size (Data Wise):

How much space do you need? How much space do you want? Remeber you are going to need space for your software and possible customer backups.I Recomend a drive above 60gb.

Powered Or Non Powered:

If your drive is powered it means that you have to plug it into a power point,if it's non powered it means that it runs off the power of the USB Port.Now you have to consider wether or not you will have acsess to Power points if you are working on site (Such as at offices and customer homes) you may NOT have any nearby,but powered external hardrives are generally slighlty cheaper and get slightly better performance,but a non powered external hardrive is more convinient and smaller.

Size (Physically):

You alse have to consider the size of the drive? Are you going to be able to fit in into your Toolbox? Including the cables needed?


Once you have bought your hardrive and you have it home,the best thing to do is format it.

1.Partitioning the Drive

What we are going to do now is partition the drive into 3 Partitions:

1.Portable Apps
2.Software
3.Games

Now why games you ask? Some customer may ask you do you have any decent games,About 1 in 3 of my customers ask me,so it may happen to you .

Now partition this drive into 3 partitions as stated above,If you need help:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Gparted

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*BE CAREFUL YOU DONT FORMAT THE WRONG DRIVE*

3. Selecting the Right Software

So now you have Partitioned it into 3 partitions,Now we need the right software to load onto your hardrive! First we are going to start with the Portable Apps Partition.

Download This and install it onto the Portable Apps Partition.

Now once you have Installed this onto the hardrive,we need to put some software onto it.Now this drive will be for our Diagnostic Software:

I Recomend:

Notepad++ Portable - Lightwieght Text Editor

NVU Portable - WYSIWYG HTML Editor

GIMP Portable - Photo Editor

Firefox Portable - Internet Broswer

WinSCP Portable - FTP Client

Sumatra Portable - PDF Reader

Clamwin Portable - Antivirus Scanner

Infrarecorder Portable - CD/DVD Burning Suite

7zip Portable - Zip,RAR And More Compressor/Decompressor

JK Defrag Portable - Defraging program

Light Screen Portable - Screenshot Taker

Toucan Portable - Backup System

CCleaner Portable - Computer Cleaner

Aida32 Portable - Diagnostic Software
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Now for the software Drive! This software is also diagnostic software but it may need to be installed,it also contains software that the customer might need/want also should contain Service packs and drivers.

A Word of warning: NEVER,EVER Give customers hacked/Cracked/Pirated software!
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Open Office

CD Burner XP

Speedfan

JK Defrag

Every HDD manugacturer has there own HDD Diagnostic software,Please se here.

Avast

Avg

Zonealarm

Kompozer

NVU

Frostwire

Google Pack

Flash Player

Foxit PDF Reader

Firefox

Thunderbird

Pidgin

Winamp

Windows Media Player 11

VLC

Quicktime

GIMP

DVD43

MediaCoder

Audacity

Windows XP SP2 And Sp3

Windows Vista Sp1


You may also want to include Drivers on your drive,you can driver packs from here.

Now for games:


Plasma Pong

Urban Terror

Flight Gear

Scorched3d

Armegatron advanced

Phun



As a guide - You dont need all of this software but i HIGHLY Recomend it all.


Once you have put all of your software on the correct partitions,and organized it all - You have now got the ultimate External IT Toolbox hardrive! You may want to search google and download sites (Such as softpedia,Download.com,Filehippo) for more software/games that you could put on your drives!





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[root]

nice idea...

to be honest, even if you don't go out fixing other peoples PCs, and only fix your own, it's nice to have an external HDD drive with the stuff on that you need for a speedy rebuild in case of emergency.

 

[LukaszR1]

nice idea. +1

 

[Neodude1123201]

nice idea...

to be honest, even if you don't go out fixing other peoples PCs, and only fix your own, it's nice to have an external HDD drive with the stuff on that you need for a speedy rebuild in case of emergency.

Good point there too!

 

[Remeniz]

nice idea...

to be honest, even if you don't go out fixing other peoples PCs, and only fix your own, it's nice to have an external HDD drive with the stuff on that you need for a speedy rebuild in case of emergency.

Thats exactly why I have my RAID 1 array.

For all those applications that I have aquired over the last year. And yes, it does make for a speedy recovery if/when things go wrong.