Want to turn your Windows installation DVD into an installation flash drive? WinToFlash can do that and more.

WinToFlash can transfer Windows XP, Vista, and 7 onto a flash drive as well as Server 2003 and 2008. WinToFlash can also transfer Windows Preinstallation Environments to flash drive.

The process is simple and mostly obvious. You tell WinToFlash where the installation files you want to transfer are located and either let the transfer wizard take care of things, or specify settings like what kind of format the flash drive will undergo. In our test using a USB 2.0 generic flash drive it took about 12 minutes to turn a Windows 7 installation DVD into a USB-based installer.

WinToFlash is freeware, Windows only.

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It is not easy as it sounds to transfer a Windows installation DVD to a flash drive. The whole process can be divided into two manual steps. Files from the Windows installation DVD have to be transferred to the USB drive which has to be made bootable as well. Beginners might prefer an easier solution to the manual approach.

WinToFlash has been designed to make the process as straightforward as possible. The portable software program comes with a wizard that helps users transfer files from a Windows installation DVD to an USB flash drive. The software supports the transfer of various Windows installation DVDs, namely transferring Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 or Windows 7 installations to an USB flash drive.

The program can also transfer Windows PE installations to USB flash drive. All it basically takes to transfer the files is to specify the path of the Windows installation DVD and the path of the USB flash drive. The program will handle the rest. It will transfer the installation DVD to the USB flash drive and make the flash drive bootable so that users can boot from it and install the Windows operating system from USB flash drive.

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Network administrators and home network users need to check the speed of the local area network during installation but also from time to time to make sure that the speed matches the expected speed of the lan. This is important for a variety of reasons including overal network performance and discovering slow network nodes that can have a impact on services.

LAN Speed Test is a portable software program to test the speed of a local area network. The program will display the name and IP address of the computer that is it running on. Tests are started with a click on the Start Test button. This will open a file browser to select a folder the data should be read from and written to. This should be on a different computer system so that the actual lan speed is tested.

The program will ask for a file size of the file that will be written and read in the second step of the lan speed test configuration. It will then write the file to the target location, clear the Windows file cache, read the file back, clear the cache a second time, delete the file and display the results of the speed test.

The results can be printed but not exported to a file. Lan Speed Test is available from the developer’s website. It is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems including Windows 7 (not sure about 64-bit though).

[ Download Lan Speed Test ]

Many applications and servers create log files that record events. Log analyzers are being used to analyze the log files more comfortably. It’s theoretically possible to use a text editor to analzyze log files or a desktop search tool that indexes contents but log anyalyzers usually provide access to features that these general tools do not offer.

Log Lady might be a strange name for a log analyzer. The portable software program does offer an interesting feature that many other log analyzers do not offer. It can load multiple log files in its interface to search them simultaneously.

Only two steps are needed to perform a log analysis of multiple log files. A directory on the local computer system has to be selected. The software program will automatically display log, txt and xml files and filter the rest. It is possible to display all files that reside in the folder which can be useful if the log files have a different file extension. All or only some of the log files can then be selected for analysis.

The log analyzer will recognize the columns of the log file and offer to search in all columns or a specific one.

The results of the search are then displayed in the central area of the program. It is furthermore possible to export the results of the log analysis in a csv file.

Log Lady is a free software program for the Windows operating system. The log analyzer can be downloaded form the developer’s homepage.

LicenseCrawler is a portable and free tool for retrieving serial numbers and product keys from your computer. A simple scan with LicenseCrawler ensures you’ll never be left trying to reinstall software without the proper key.

LicenseCrawler doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself, it just does it much faster and without you actually having to open up your registry editor. The application scans over your Windows registry file, without altering it, and looks for instances of serial numbers, license keys, and other identifying bits of information.

It found a number of licenses on our test system, but it if the application in question doesn’t store its product key in the registry—instead in the program or application data folder—LicenseCrawler will miss it.

Have a handy tool for keeping track of and searching out product keys? Lets hear about it in the comments. LicenseCrawler is freeware, Windows only.

[ Download LicenseCrawler ]