GroupShot photo editing tool from MS

This is awesome. I do quite a lot of digital photography, and never quite find the time to go and re-touch those photos to get the perfect image, or to carefully cut, layer, alpha-channel and merge images to get stunning panoramas or remove that annoying tourist in the background.

Now I can get the power of the machine to do it all for me using the brilliant bit of software that is Microsoft’s GroupShot. This is being touted by MS as a free download to make Vista Ultimate even better (what’s better than Ulitmate?). However, I thought I’d give it a try and it seems to install and run just fine on my Windows XP sp2 system. Read more of this post

Change local admin passwords with PwdMan

PwdMan is a free tool which allows you to easily change the password on the local administrator (or other local user) account on one or many Windows machines in one go. You need to have admin rights already of course (eg through a domain admin account) and have network access to the machine, but this is still a useful tool – especially if a system administrator leaves your organisation.

Read more about it in this Redmond Mag article or go straight to the download page.

Burning an ISO image to CD or DVD

I’ve never had a problem doing this as I have been lucky enough to have third-party tools which do a perfectly good job of it. However, if you do not, you will be pleased to find out that the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (which is free and can be installed on XP) has two command-line tools to help with this – cdburn and dvdburn. Read more about this in Steve Lamb’s blog here.