re software (Score 1)

Personally I'd look at these sites Barts PE CD and 911CD They asist you in creating a recovery/util cd for win based systems, dos based utils and even small linux distro (Tomsrtbt). For just finding a good prog for testing hardware sisoft and aida are nice but search tucows nonags etc and you will find freeware progs that have tons of functionality and are not as bloated/intrusive as large name companies software (i.e Norton). Pisnaz