Here are some things I found while following up on some of my geek reading:

• I’ve been using this trick for years, but gHacks just recently posted about it. It’s all about using the Windows Debugging Tools to tear apart crash dumps. I have this tool on my Pen Drive (along with a whole bunch of other goodies, that’s for another post). Cool to see it mentioned again by someone else. GMTA! [gHacks.net]
• Macrium Reflect – cool “ghost” style tool for making hard drive backups, is FREE and includes a way to create linux or WinPE style restore disks, like Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (which is a REALLY cool tool, by the way; go read about that too. Symantec’s Tool allows restoration to disparate hardware.) [Macrium Reflect] [Symantec BE SR]
• While you are at it, go take a look at Nirsoft. This guy creates LOTS of really cool tools, many of which are also on my ever handy Pen Drive. [NirSoft]

Also on the geek front, I mounted a secondary drive in my system running Ubuntu and have been using it on and off along with my Windows setup. I still use Windows primarily, but I am going to keep Ubuntu on here as a secondary option so I can get used to it and maybe learn something useful. I tried extracting the boot sector from the Ubuntu disk and having my Windows boot loader boot using it, but it hangs at a cursor. Seems like you have to do some hacking to the menus.lst file under /boot/grub to get it to work . . . and I am just not that adventurous. I’ll just use my BIOS boot drive selector instead. Easier.