Diagnosing network problems

So your old mother calls and says she cant connect to the Internet, bummer you have to go through hoops to make her open a command prompt, ping this and that and before you know it you have spent an hour or more. Well Windows today actually has a decent looking utility for testing network connectivity (it may be enough for that initial test), and this may thus be worth a look before getting into the command prompt. The utility is here; C:WINDOWSNetwork Diagnosticxpnetdiag.exe Or you can get it from here; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=ea541e8e-85a3-4d2f-a3a4-b329d03fc2fa
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Classroom Spy Professional

ss_main_windowJust heard about this and have thus not tested it myself, but it sound nifty..

From the website;
It is hard to teach a group of people how to use a PC, or even how to use a specific program on a PC or the internet.

Yes, PC or web training isn’t easy. For someone who’s doing something right, there are probably two others doing it wrong, playing games, checking email, shopping…

Classroom Spy lets you see what everyone’s doing – without leaving your desk. You can monitor the activity of all the PCs in your classroom remotely. Plus, you can share your screen with your students’ PCs, making demos and presentations much easier.

http://www.classroomspy.com/
http://www.classroomspy.com/download.htm

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Gladinet your friendly Skydrive cabbie

feature1_1A new addition to the Skydrive saga (or rather to many of the online storage services – gmail, S3 etc etc).  This tool should be capable of adding your Skydrive/S3/Gmail etc as a drive letter, this would be a GREAT help as Skydrive is neat but requires you to create the directory structure manually 🙁

It is still in beta but free (lets hope it stay that way :-)).
http://www.gladinet.com/p/index.htm

Tnx to CRHO for the tip.

UPDATE January 16th 2009. I discovered an unfortunate effect of the above software, anything you have on your eg. Skydrive is cached locally, the issue with this is that if you have 25gb on your skydrive then the folder below will ALSO have 25gb, and for some with sparse disk space (or roamingf profiles) this may become an issue.

Windows XP cache folder;
"C:Documents and Settings\%username%Local 
SettingsApplication DataGladinetcache"
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