Free Stuff!

My most favorite of webpages! (And also some junk!)

This is a list of sites offering stuff at my favorite price:

(some require or sneak in AD's but if they are large and intrusive or create 'pop-up's' I WONT add them!) We all pay enough for our PC and Internet access so why not use free stuff whenever we can?

Need to find a decent free Usenet server because AT&T & Comcast has decided not to provide Usenet access post merger? Check out this site then! You can get all sorts of information on servers including how large they are, how long they retain posts, if they allow posting etc.!
freenews.maxbaud.net
I even like the name of the site... ;-)

Need to find decent free webspace because because your provider only provides 'basic' web serving and don't allow CGI or SSI or the webspace size of your site might change because of a merger between two large companys ^{(AT&T & Comcast)}?
www.freewebspace.net
I even like the name of this site as well... ;-)

freebies.com The Original Freebies® Bringing you the best freebies since 1977!

They say nothing in life is free. But this website is! Has coupons, trials and more stuff at you guessed it, my favorite price!

Project Gutenberg - books for those too cheap to purchase them!

Free ISP's! - (not all areas are covered and some intentionally spam you)

Free dialup.org! works GREAT but the 413 phone number is long distance for my residence :-(

Well I hate to burst everyones bubble on this one but it can't be done. If you have a DVD that is only a quarter or less full then sure you can copy it onto a CD with no loss of video. But DVD's can hold up to eight times the data a CD can. Any scam email claims will either have to break the DVD's video stream up and split it amongst eight CD's or compress the data down to where it can fit on a single CD. This 'can' be done but the compression algorithms that can yield results around 8:1 (over what a DVD already does)er usually resort to scaling down the resolution and dropping significant amounts of detail. Why would anyone want to do this? Wouldnt it just be easier to record the DVD onto a VHS or better yet a Beta tape (Beta records more detail accurately over VHS) since you are giving up a lot of the detail involved?

Lukes Video Guide Video Capture Bible

One little utility people may find useful for testing their networks out is the PING command. This nifty utility is used to send a 'ping' request out over your network (or the Internet) and it returns back whether or not this request was received and how long. To ping yourself use PING 127.0.0.1. (If your return times arent very low you have problems!)

An even more useful one has to the TRACERT. This one goes one step further and tells you the path the request took to get to its destination.

WINIPCFG this one will tell you your current IP address, location of DNS servers over your dialup network, LAN etc.

Don't feel like spending $40 on some software that claims to copy your entire drive to your new drive during an upgrade? Then don't! Windows 95 & 98 have a nice little unadvertised utility that does this for you. You need to do it from the Dos prompt so Windows 2000 folks are out of luck. :-( To use it make sure you have both your drives online in the same system. If you make your new drive the slave drive in an IDE setup (For SCSCI use a higher ID number so that your old drive remains C:) while your old drive is the master. Boot into windows and then drop into a dos prompt. Dos Mode won't give you all the features you need. Once there type XCOPY32 C:\*.* D:\*.* /E /F /H /R /K /Y.
These options are as follows:
E Copies directories and sub directories, including empty ones.
F Displays full source and destination file names while copying.^{(Not really necessary but it is nice to see what it is doing)}
H Copies hidden and system files also.
R Overwrites read-only files.
K Copies attributes. Normal Xcopy will reset read-only attributes.
Y Overwrites existing files without prompting.
This has to do be done for each volume on your harddrive. A good check for this command is to wait until it is finished and go into the root directory on each volume and do a "DIR /A /S" and compare the number of files and number of bytes. If you arent sure on how to use Fdisk and the dos mode please be careful! Either seek help or email me!

Network acting up? Don't feel like spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a network analyzer? Then don't! Ethereal is available for free! Etheral is easy to setup, has interactive filtering and even does a good part of the analyzing for you.

Need to help out a distant family member with a Windows problem but they can't quite describe the problem over the phone? Need to control other computers on your network remotely? Well there is a *FREE* gem that does all this! Real VNC (Virtual Network Computer) even allows you to control cross platform, what this means is: you can view a Macintosh from Windows, a Windows machine from Linux etc! The home page for this is located at www.uk.research.att.com/vnc

Unless you feel like spending $100 or more each year on new versions of Micro$oft Windows to fix last years bugs you may want to check on the following "free" links:

Download Linux distributions for FREE

Homepage for Linux information

My first time installing Linux I had it installed on a clean hard drive from a bootable CD (Microsoft is finally starting to provide bootable CD's) in under 15 minutes. A RE-install of Windows usually takes around 45 minutes! Talk about a performance boost. Linux on even a Pentium II will be as snappy as a Dos machine without the Windoze overhead. Linux servers typically run for months without needing a reboot. Microsoft recommends rebooting some of there servers I believe once a week to 'refresh' things.

Email Mike!

WEB Design

A.I. - Broadband - Dnets's - HTML - Linux - Mikes Vintage - Neural nets - PDA's - Spam - The net - Vintage - Windows
Amazing - Cats - Free - Great events - LEO's - News - Satellites Wii
Genealogy - MOST wanted, Berringer, Kubik, Laferriere, Mailman, Wessell.