Ultimate Boot CD

Ultimate Boot CD is completely free for the download, or could be obtained for a small fee.

You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:

Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn’t you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!
Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.

You can download the latest version of Ultimate Boot CD by clicking the image below.

Creating an effective USB blocking GPO – Spiceworks

Introduction

I spent several hours reading technet tutorials, spiceworks posts, and other various how-to/guide/tutorials and was not able to get a GPO effectively blocking usb access for users in a security group.

I managed to effectively construct a working USB blocking GPO and would like to save people some headaches by posting a complete start to finish guide for Group Policy beginners that fills in the various gaps I found in other tutorials.

via Creating an effective USB blocking GPO – Spiceworks.

MicroLink GSM – tiny, Arduino compatible, rapid prototyping

I just backed up this project on KickStarter

What is MicroLink GSM?

Tiny self-contained board that can do automation, alerts, cellular data, phone calls, SMS text messages, and more – USB plug & play.

MicroLink_2

Technical information

Atmel Atmega328P microcontroller – same as Arduino UNO
Latest generation SIM800H module (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Genuine FTDI USB chip
Interrupt pins available
An LED is connected to pin D13, same as the Arduino UNO
Gold plated IPEX u.Fl antenna connector
Quad-band multi-region antenna included
Accepts standard sized SIM card
6 uA sleep current (Extra Flash: 11 uA)
Approx. 10 mA typical processing current
Approx. 400 mA net peak momentary current during GSM events
Can be powered and programmed by USB Micro USB
UART (Serial), SPI, and I2C peripherals
Atmega328P talks with SIM800H using AT commands (easy, reliable)
0.1 inch pitch pins – can fit on a standard breadboard.

USB Selective Suspend – Turn On or Off

The USB selective suspend feature allows the hub driver to suspend an individual USB port without affecting the operation of the other USB ports on the hub. Selective suspension of USB devices is especially useful in portable computers, since it helps conserve battery power. Many devices, such as fingerprint readers and other kinds of biometric scanners, only require power intermittently. Suspending such devices, when the device is not in use, reduces overall power consumption. More importantly, any device that is not selectively suspended may prevent the USB host controller from disabling its transfer schedule, which resides in system memory. DMA transfers by the host controller to the scheduler can prevent the system’s processors from entering deeper sleep states, such as hibernate.

This tutorial will show you how to turn on or off USB selective suspend to automatically power down idle USB devices in Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/147369-usb-selective-suspend-turn-off.html