Did your client forget their Instant Messenger password? Messenpass is a portable, freeware application designed to show the passwords of a variety of instant messengers. Supported programs include:

• MSN Messenger
• Windows Messenger (In Windows XP)
• Windows Live Messenger (In Windows XP/Vista/7)
• Yahoo Messenger (Versions 5.x and 6.x)
• Google Talk
• ICQ Lite 4.x/5.x/2003
• AOL Instant Messenger v4.6 or below, AIM 6.x, and AIM Pro.
• Trillian
• Trillian Astra
• Miranda
• GAIM/Pidgin
• MySpace IM
• PaltalkScene
• Digsby

Messenpass applies to the current user logged in on the computer and it only works if one of the above programs was set to remember passwords. It can’t be used to grab passwords of other users. When Messenpass is run it automatically detects installed IM programs and decrypts any stored passwords, showing them in the Messenpass window. If it fails to detect any installed IM program they can be manually added with the ‘Select Folder’ option from the File menu. In the main page of Messenpass any passwords can be selected and copied to the clipboard in a tab-delimited format.

Messenpass also has command line options which are shown in a table on the web page.
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CDBurnerXP is a freeware, portable burning application designed to burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and HD-DVDs. Its license offers free commercial use as well as private use.

Many free burning applications are short on features or turn out to only be annoying trials but CDBurnerXP is truly free and has plenty of features including creating/burning ISOs, audio CDs, bootable disks, Lightscribe integration, and command line options. It also doesn’t require admin privileges, unlike Nero.

There are two versions, the full-install version and a portable version. Despite what the name suggests, it works on a lot more than XP; supported Windows versions are 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008/Win7 (x86 / x64).
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LAN Speed test is a small, portable application designed to quickly and accurately test LAN speeds. There are two versions, version 1.1 is free for any type of use where version 2.0 is $5 per commercial license but it can be used on unlimited computers. The older v1.1 is slower and has less features, but to just test LAN speed it is just as good as v2.0.

The way it works is that it writes a fairly large file, the default is 100mb but you can choose, to a system across the network. It then clears the windows file cache to keep read times from being skewed too high, reads the file back, clears the cache again, deletes the file, and displays the results.

The application is very portable requiring no install and it doesn’t change the registry. Version 1.1 works on Windows 98SE and up and version 2.0 works on Windows 2000 and up.

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LiberKey isn’t technically a repair tool but it is a great and easy way to organize your portable applications on your USB flash drive. It’s a totally free program that you use to build an interface of your portable applications so they are accessible via right-click menu. LiberKey comes with an online catalog of 304 applications available to download, to use the catalog you have to enable file associations in LiberKey first or your browser won’t know what to do. When downloading applications, just choose which ones you want and LiberKey will download them and install them into your library. There is also the option to download a few different versions of LiberKey with pre-loaded applications and additional applications can be added on.
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SafeMSI.exe is a tiny, portable, freeware application designed to let you uninstall programs in safe mode. When the computer is in safe mode, the Windows Installer service isn’t started so most programs can’t be uninstalled. Since technicians do a lot of work in safe mode and being unable to uninstall is a huge bother. It is also not possible to start the service manually, an error message will come up saying “Could not start the Windows Installer service on Local Computer. Error 1084: This service cannot be started in Safe Mode”. This tool will do a registry tweak so that Windows Installer is made a safe service and it will launch the Windows Installer service. The tool is meant to be used after you are already in safe mode, it is a tiny .exe that just needs to be double-clicked or run and it runs very quickly.
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Beep Codes Viewer is a small, portable, freeware application designed to give you a quick place to look up what beep codes mean. As we know, the POST runs when the computer boots up to check that the computer meets minimum system requirements and that all hardware is working properly. When the test completes it will make a single beep or two beeps depending on motherboard manufacturer to indicate all is well and continue to boot. If the test fails it will emit no beep or a series of beeps as a beep code. This tool offers a quick directory to look up that code, with different codes by motherboard manufacturer, and see what the problem is.

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A big dilemma for Computer Technicians while working onsite is that they cannot know the meaning of every single error message; yet they dont want to use Google in front of a client because it makes them look like they dont know what they are doing.

This is where a website called “Goosh.org” comes in. Goosh is an unofficial site that allows you to search Google via the command line. Obviously, the main benefit of this is that it doesn’t actually look like Google in front of you client. If you are quick, it looks pretty impressive from a clients perspective as you punch away commands. If you are familiar with command line interfaces, you will feel right at home. To search, just start typing.
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UnDBX is a small, portable and freeware application designed to recover emails from Outlook Express databases.
Outlook Express databases can be vulnerable to corruption for many reasons, but the main one is when the databases become very large. Once it corrupts, Outlook Express will not be able to use the database and therefor it will be difficult to recover the emails it contains.
UnDBX will take the individual emails in the database and export them as .EML files which you can then open one by one.

To use this application, select the folder where your Outlook Express .DBX files are located (this is usually filled out for you) and then select the folder you would like to extract the .EML files to. Just press the Extract button and you are on your way.
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A big problem for computer technicians is trying to reproduce the error that the client is encountering. If we don’t know exactly what they did to cause it, it is hard to track down the problem. This is where an application built into Windows 7 called “Problem Step Recorder” can help.

Windows 7 Problem Step Recorder will record the steps that either you or your client take that will eventually result in a certain computer problem. Once you have finished recording the steps, it outputs each step as a screenshot and puts them in an MHT document (webpage). It will also include a text only description of the steps down the bottom of the page. It will then place all the contents of this recording into a ZIP file so that it can be easily emailed.

You could also use this application to create a step-by-step guide for your client on how to do a certain tasks like burn a CD, get pictures off the digital camera and more.
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SARDU (Shardana Antivirus Rescue Disk Utility) is a small freeware utility designed to combine all of your bootable ISOs and turn them into a single ISO with a boot menu. You can either burn this ISO to a single CD/DVD, or you can get SARDU to create it for a bootable USB drive. Basically, this aims to eliminate the need to carry around heaps of different bootable CDs.

Despite having “Antivirus Rescue Disk utility” in its name, it is not limited to just running Antivirus boot CDs. You can also include other tools like GParted, Ophcrack, UBCD4Win and various Linux live CDs.

The creator of this application is also a member of the Technibble community so if you have any feedback or suggestions, he is likely to read it.
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