Tiptastic round up...

OK, as promised earlier, here are all the outstanding tips and tools we've had passed to us in the round so far in one great big update...

Andrew Piper and Brian Whitty, Woodchurch High School
A useful set of tools for network analysis and monitoring from Fluke Networks (www.flukenetworks.com) - I think they fall in the category of "good but pricey"

Chris Norman
Another tool is Spotlight on Windows, a freeware monitoring tool for a machine, which looks impressively funky in some of the screenshots at http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-windows/

Nick Walton
...also recommended Spotlight on Windows via email after Coventry, and is spot on when he describes it as 'making you desktop look like the Starship Enterprise'!

Tony Clemson
The beautifully titled "Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder", a freeware app which allows you to extract product keys from existing installations for operating systems and other apps, a useful ability with old applications for which you may have lost the original media. More info here: http://magicaljellybean.com/keyfinder/

Marc Coyles
A suggestion clearly following the 'Network Ninja' idea is Samurize, a freeware app which gives system monitoring and other functionality, and by the look of the screenshots on their website (http://www.samurize.com/modules/news/), lots of people have been skinning the life out of it...

Richard Easton
Another 'Swiss army knife' type of freeware app suggested here, Spiceworks, which does asset reporting, monitoring, troubleshooting and so on. Details here: http://www.spiceworks.com/

Chris Guy
Rather than recommending a tool, Chris passed on some very useful information for those of you who have Virgin Media at home. Apparently, they are gradually rolling out an upgrade from a 10Mbit to 20Mbit service. However, having not noticed a difference, and investigated further, it transpires that if you have a Motorola Surfboard 1800 modem, this only has a 10Mbit port on it! Hence if you get the upgrade, make sure you get an upgraded modem too, otherwise you'll not "feel the benefit", as my mum used to say...

There should probably be a standard disclaimer thingy here like is pasted on the bottom of everyone's emails these days, but that's very dull, so I'll put the more accurate: since we've been on the road, none of us have had a chance to download or try out any of these tools yet. That's not to say they're not useful, just we haven't been able to check yet!