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What Would You Load onto a Business Card CD?

Posted by Cliff on from the taking-your-critical-utils-with-you dept.

tkrabec asks: "I have a few of the Business card sized CD-roms, and I have been toying around about what to put on them. I want to make a utility disk that has stuff I commonly use or would find helpful. These CD's will hold about 50 meg I primarily do work with Win32 but I would also like some helpful linux things. I will probably make 2 disks wo get all data/programs I want. I want to put: dos boot.img 1.4Meg for older machines, rawrite 14K to write .img's to floppy's, putty 695K for secure communications, memtest.img 75K for testing for bad memory, fdisk 65K for HD problems, Winzip 1.2Meg for unzipping things. These are just some idea's and I would like some more with some approximate sizes. Also are there any good references that I could put on there as well?"

6 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. what would I put on them? by NeoTomba · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, considering they're business card CDs, I'd put on them some useful, business related information:

    1. My resume
    2. A link to my personal web site
    3. Some pictures of me, so maybe whoever I gave the card to will associate my face with my name
    4. Maybe some of the music I've written as mp3 (or, if catering to a Slashdot crowd, ogg)
    5. Anything interesting I've written that business associates might be interested in
    6. Other nifty personal stuff
    7. A cool screensaver, maybe? I dunno... I'm stretching now.

    Make it professional, make it interesting, put some good, personally important stuff on there.

    And, uh, be creative!

    -NeoTomba

  2. How about using Trinux? by FLaMeBoY · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The trinux iso is about 40MB, and I was going to stick it onto a business card cd when I can find some. Some many things I can think of to do with them.

  3. A few more suggestions for the Windows version by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    - Hex editor, if you're that way inclined
    - *Powerful* editor of choice (e.g. emacs, vi, PFE, etc.). Using notepad gets old REAL fast...
    - Recent service pack, assuming it'll fit. I find myself searching for this more than anything else at sys repair time. Alternately, any recent IE update includes a lot of files that tend to get overwritten
    - Small footprint, time wasting game of choice for those hours spent in computer rooms waiting for systems to rebuild. Think Tetris or nethack
    - Resume. Never know when you'll want it...
    - Download of www.darwinawards.com, text and hyperlinks only

    Hmm, I'm sure there should be more

  4. THE Killer Business Card CD-R by slashdot_commentator · · Score: 3, Interesting



    MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator)

    (To the culturally deprived, its an emulator for arcade machine ROMS. You can play thousands of games from Donkey Kong to Bubble Bobble to Mortal Kombat. And you're not even limited to x86 platforms.)

    Can't install games onto your work PC? Just run/boot off of your portable game cdrom.

    Try these links:

    MAME Homepage

    MAME32 Homepage (MAME with a GUI menu)

    An Arcade ROM Repository

    Use Google to get you more ROM websites.

    I really need to cook up one for myself. I like the idea of booting Linux and going straight to MAME, but it would eat CD-R space that could be used for more ROMs. Then again, booting Linux would let me setup a RAMdisk, which may help MAME deal with disk write issues. (There may be a M$ Windows utility that will create a RAMdisk without rebooting the OS.)

    Last of all, a tip. Do your configuring on a CD-RW disk, get the written size under 50MB, and then burn the final ISO onto the business card CD-R.

    Have fun.

    --
    There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
  5. http://www.tinyapps.org/ by foo+fighter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'd make the disk bootable to a DOS prompt. DOS is still very useful for recovering Windows systems (at least 3.11 to Millenium, it doesn't work with NT, or 2000). I'd try and track down DOS drivers for the network cards you use and have those load with the TCP/IP stack at boot-time as well.

    TinyApps.org has some great stuff there, and it's all very small but very useful. For example, I'd dump WinZip and go with FreeZip. 1.5MB vs. 250KB

    Here's my list:
    * xcopy
    * del
    * deltree
    * rename
    * mkdir
    * rmdir
    * format
    * fdisk
    * Something like Norton Disk Edit where you can see and edit the whole disk.
    * a DOS-based text editor.
    * a file-splitter
    * a file decompressor (pkzip?)
    * a web browser (if you loaded the drivers at boot).
    * maybe a partition resizer
    * the cygwin-lite unix tools for 9x/ME/NT4/2000

    Hope that gives you some help, and some room for improvement.

    --
    obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
  6. Magic Key by gCGBD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would install a utility that executes upon "autorun" and kills the screensaver (screen lock) application.

    This would be very handy when you need to get into someone else's PC and the screen is locked.(When they are running the M$ OS.) You simply stick it in the CDROM and a few seconds later have access.

    The smaller CD format would be handy to stick in your wallet or shirt pocket for just such occaisions.

    --

    O=='=++