We have all seen these types of disks advertised online at the auctions. Most claim to contain some, or any of the following:

Use our utilities to diagnose, analyse, and troubleshoot your computer memory, CPU, hard drive, floppy drives, interrupts, controllers, CD- ROM drive(s) video/monitor, etc.

All you need for over 500 hardware device drivers!!

Never get disconnected from the Internet again! Use programs to keep your Internet sessions constantly connected . Speed up your Internet connection by 30% to 50% with TCP/IP software.

Improve memory management and speed up your PC!

Get FREE software from Microsoft and other leading software houses!

Find ANYONE on the Internet with our Net Detective!

Plus Much Much More!!!

The ads are all very similar. One even boasts that they 'cram' over 330 MB onto their CD. A standard CD-ROM has a capacity of 650 MB, so it is highly unlikely they would have to 'cram' anything on it.

We decided to take the plunge and see what all the fuss was about. We sure could use some of those great utilities they mentioned and the drivers information on it could come in useful. We waited about 6 weeks for it to arrive, and we were a little disappointed. (Well, we only paid $9.95 + $12.00 P+P to get it out here, so I guess we couldn't expect too much, which reminds us, the postage cost $3.50, the CD was in a jewel case wrapped in card. Be careful what these guys charge you for postage... Ed.). Anyway, we decided to let people know what they would be getting if they decided to buy one of these disks. No doubt there are many different disks out there. Some will contain different information, though most ads claim very similar content. They are all around the same price and one could argue that even if you only got one 'gem' off the disk it would be worth the money. We suspect many people buy a disk, simply duplicate it and sell it for slightly less than the competition.

The disk itself was a generic unlabelled CDR. It contained precisely 144 MB of data, including the following:

Windows 95 DOS .com and .exe programs (checkdisk, format, xcopy etc.)

Windows 98 DOS .com and .exe programs

Netscape 4.5 (which gives an idea of the age of the disk)

A shareware benchmarking utility called Sandra (available anywhere on the net)

Links to hardware vendors

Windows Y2K patches (available from Microsoft site)

Office 97 service packs (available from Microsoft site)

5 shareware hardware 'test' programs

53 utilities for speeding up your Internet connection, managing memory and similar tasks.

'Bonus' report on 'How to get free software'

'Bonus' report on 'How to find out anything about anyone'

Well, that sure seems a lot. It is and it isn't. Most of the utilities are shareware and everything can be downloaded from download.com or similar site. The ad implied that the disk contained up-to-date drivers for the more popular hardware, a claim that we found hard to believe considering the logistics involved. In fact it contained an html file with comprehensive links to hardware sites. You can find a copy of that file displayed here.

The utilities could be quite useful, though any serious computer guru will see them as being gimmicks. We certainly wouldn't want to run half of them on our machines. They are however good fun to play with, and hopefully you wont do any damage to your system installation in the process. By all means source some of these utilities, you can find a list of them on our disk here.

As for the 'bonuses'...

Online detective.

The ad copy boasted that with this bonus we could 'find anything on anyone'. This does look pretty comprehensive, and we imagine that with time you could indeed find a lot of details with the links provided. The full list of links is listed here for those of you who are interested.

The 'Get Free Software' angle.

We have all seen the ads on the auction sites about how to score free software from all the big names. The copy tells us that these companies cant wait to give their wares away, but only to those willing to pay the going rate (currently $5.00- $10.00) to the seller to receive the secret. We can save you that money by telling you what the secret is. The report we obtained refers only to Microsoft products. We can only assume that by clicking around the other companies' sites you can glean the same kind of information and get their software using similar methods. We haven't tried it and we do not claim that this will work for you, we are only showing you what these types of reports contain. To read all about the 'offer' click here.

There we have it. We expected a little more in light of the advertising, but we were impressed with the 'bonus' features. We feel however that anyone with a little time and access to a CD burner could create a far more up-to-date and comprehensive disk than this one.

Secrets You Should Know. This site is intended for entertainment purposes only.