Making a bootable USB flash drive for Windows Vista and Windows 7 isn’t all that tricky, but it’s always nice to find an app that simplifies things. Not only does WinToFlash make the process about as easy as it can get, but it can also create Windows XP, Server 2003, and Server 2008 installers.

The default options make it easy to roll a silent Windows install, or you can flip the custom switch and specify the exact setup parameters you want to use.

The handy app also has one more trick up its sleeve: moving Windows Preinstall environments. PE discs can be extremely handy for troubleshooting and repairs, and being able to painlessly zap them over to a USB flash drive means not having to burn a new copy every time someone’s haggard old optical drive decides to chew up your CD.

WinToFlash is a free download and is totally portable. It’s an excellent tool to add to your USB-related utilities.

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Proton Exora

KUALA LUMPUR: Proton Holdings Bhd unveiled its first multipurpose vehicle (MPV), the Exora, to the public in a gala event here Wednesday night.

Launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, the 1.6-litre Exora has already received orders of 2,500 units, even before its public unveiling.

The seven-seater — Proton’s most important model for the year — also marks the company’s entry into the MPV market, which is growing domestically and regionally.

In addition to an interior that is easily more spacious than other MPVs in its engine class, the Exora also comes with a separate air-conditioner blower with ceiling mounted vents for the second and third row passengers.
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Hands-on Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it’s easy to back up. We don’t mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst.

PCs often come with recovery disks that you can use to place a fresh copy of the OS and pre-loaded apps back onto a freshly formatted drive. With some free, open source tools, you make one of your own, for your netbook. It’ll work whether you use Linux or Windows XP, and whether your machine has a hard disk or a solid-state drive.

We use PING – which stands for Partition Image Not Ghost, a reference to Norton Ghost, a commercial disk duplication app – but it requires an external CD drive to boot from. So we’ve also included details of a second tool, which you can install on a USB Flash drive.

PING comes from WindowsDream here (http://ping.windowsdream.com/cgi-bin/download.pl). Make sure you download the “community edition”, which is the free version. It’s a 22MB .iso file you burn to CD or DVD. Connect your optical drive to your netbook, put the disc and and start up the computer. You’ll need to access the machine’s boot menu, if it has one – ESC on an Eee PC; F12 on an Acer Aspire One, for instance – or enter the Bios setup screen and make sure your optical drive is at the top of the list of devices the computer can start up from.

PING loads up through a small Linux kernel. When it’s ready, it’ll tell you to press Enter to start. The screens that follow guide you through either backing up or restoring your system, but the process isn’t perhaps as clear as it might be, so we’ll walk you through it. PING also lets you back up to a network store, which we won’t cover here, but isn’t so very different from archiving your netbook on a USB hard drive or Flash stick.

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1. Download the latest update file from http://rapidshare.com/users/12TMR5
2. Extract to the root of your hard drive or USB drive, or any other folder that you’re comfortable with. Make note of the folder, for eg. C:\nod_upd.
3. Start the Registry Editor and browse to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ ESET \ Nod \ CurrentVersion \ Modules \ Update \ Settings \ Config000 \ Settings.
4. Under that, find the item named “SelectedServer”. Change its value (default is “AUTOSELECT”) to “FILE:C:/nod_upd/”. Ensure that the path is the one you extracted your files into and that the slashes are forward, UNIX-style ones. Close the Registry Editor.
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