Remember the good old days, when PCs were young and programs were
small?You could put DOS and a bunch of useful tools on a single
floppy disk, which always held a place of honor near your computer
for when things went south. Technology changes and bloatware have
changed this, but Ultimate Boot CD brings them back with a
high-tech vengeance.
To be clear on what UBCD isn’t–it’s not a suite of fancy utilities
with a menu structure and lots of help screens. The disk is a
collection of bootable disk images, all stored on a bootable CD.
Boot the CD, then choose a disk image. The system then boots from
the image, and you’re running the programs on the disk. Each image
has different tools, different interfaces, and different utilities.
This is like a binder full of floppies on a single CD:a great time
saver, but not a tool for technophobes or general users. Some of
the programs on this disk can wreck your system beyond recovery if
you do not know exactly what you are doing; by the same token, a
skilled user can sometimes bring data back from the seemingly dead.
Ultimate Boot CD’s Web site contains detailed help, FAQs, and a
forum to answer your questions. There are no ‘readme’ files or
other instructions in the file here; if you do not know what to do
with a .iso file, you will need to go their site for full
instructions.
Note:Certain of the programs are older and do not seem to
recognize the latest hardware; again, checking the FAQs and forums
of their site is the best recourse.
— Ian Harac
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