I'm aware about Opus, it's very good. TC is nagware but we bought one license in about 1990 or earlier, which still works (portable installation of course) and I literally can't live without it. I have not checked the latest Opus releases but I don't expect it to differ from TC featurewise more than 2-5%. Will check.

Thanks for the tip, I know professional tools like MDT exist, but deploying new installations is not my main job. Also I don't know whether MDT still supports the deprecated OSs of Windows 98, Win XP and Win7, which I still have to deploy/repair in my uni to support old measurement systems with ISA cards etc.

I just happen to know VMware pretty well and take great pleasure when my DIY workflows just work. Can MDT deploy linux OSs, which I also do for the uni (but the OP was about Windows tools) and for distro testing on bare metal? I am just a 70s old fart, so much much worse than 90/00s :-)

I don't especially like his suggestions for dual-pane file managers (although I agree that dual-pane is a must) - personally I much prefer Total Commander which is the total Swiss knife, and integrates seamlessly with the mentioned excellent TeraCopy. The TC bulk file renamer is a bliss, the icon toolbar serves are a replacement start menu and it has a multitude of plugins that allow from reading linux filesystems (Diskinternals reader) to reading the storage and installing apps on your smartphone (ADB plugin). Also, minus five points for not mentioning HDSentinel.

I'd like to add one little known tool that I constantly use when setting up new (mostly refurbished) PCs. My workflow is installing the OS as a VM and converting it from virtual to physical. There are two solutions for the job, booting the VM with a Clonezilla ISO, or writing directly the vmdk to the physical disk using vmdk2phys (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vmdk2phys). vmdk2phys also does P2V. All is needed afterwards is expanding the OS partition, plugging the new disk in the target PC and letting the OS install the drivers. Manually install the devices that remain unrecognized and you're all setup. This workflow suits me because a) 90% of the job is done on my main fast PC; b) I install all the programs the customer needs on the VM; c) I don't need to write USBs or CDs or wait for a slow PC/laptop to install the OS and programs; and d) The same ready-made OS VMs can be used for a new customer.

This is not a suggestion thread but since I'm at it, I could also humbly suggest FloatLED (excellent small disk activity indicator for those who have their PC on the floor), DefaultProgramsEditor (because Windoze constantly change file associations), DriverStoreExplorer for troubleshooting driver problems, USBDeview for USB devices. Evidently my choices reflect a hardware point of view and not a developer one.

This is the series we need, to educate people and youngsters about the reality of the present real universe, and not series about a fictional future one (which, if not careful, we will never survive to achieve).

The EU's GPD is about $18 trillion, while Alphabet's market value is ~$1 trillion. Therefore EU has to treat Google as a foreign country and have clear evidence that it does not actively engage in hostile financial activites by disfavouring EU companies in its algorithms.

Please correct the order of magnitudes quoted. According to your numbers a 1cm squared chip contains 173x100 = 17,300 transistors only?

Intel will shut down many more departments and R&D projects in order to afford outsourcing the production of the next gen CPUs to TSMC.

This interpretation really did not cross my mind, thanks. If the question was meant to ask whether something that is legal is also ethical (or 'appropriate' as you put it)... good luck finding a consensus in slashdot!

You are absolutely correct in your observations, these two features are required in an industrial context. However, a novice in computers (as I was 35 years ago) or a teenager who just got his first PC and wants to draw/edit something or make a video, does not ask "what is the industry standard software for my needs? -they just use what is readily available or already installed on his device. Unless one wanted to earn extra geek points among their peers they wouldn't use pirated software like Photoshop (which as we know was very easy because those years Adobe never really fought piracy).

Maybe the question meant to ask "Do you believe that government should have the right to force businesses to close?"

I don't know much about USA legal matters, but in my country (in Europe) we have a Constitution and Laws, therefore the 'government' cannot 'close' anything without legislation or constitution support. Also, are these companies local of foreign-state owned? I think the question is ill-posed, it should be "Do you believe that the US government has the right to force US or other countries' businesses to close?"

I am intrigued by the statement that Foxconn is the "only contract manufacturer capable of establishing a surface-mount technology line on American soil". Does this imply that there are no SMD-capable production lines in the US whatsoever, or that there are none big enough or specialised enough to produce server motherboards? The former would imply that all printed circuit boards (which are the guts of all electronic devices) are manufactured outside the US, which I find hard to believe.

The latest Process Explorer for Windows (v16.34) phones home for some reason, while it didn't in previous versions. I know because I had to blacklist it in my firewall. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if this new ProcMon phoned home, because most Linux users wouldn't notice it unless they use an interactive per-app firewall like OpenSnitch.

We'll never know why Apple wants to make their own CPUs unless we manage to detect the security holes they will implement in them.

In other words, Privacy and Security won't make you billions