Following on from my last post where I mentioned this fantastically simple software for creating your own NAS (ideal for BackupAssist's Rsync feature), in this post I'm going to take things a step further and outline how to go about setting it up.
Over the past few years we've used a variety of different virtualisation tools but have historically always stuck to a mixture of either VMWare tools (esxi, Player and Workstation) or Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.
These have worked really well for building larger virtual server platforms but recently I was looking for a quick and easy to configure tool that I could use on my own desktop PC. I was just looking to build some simple test machines for evaluating software in a range of scenarios.
After some browsing I came across Oracle VirtualBox and I must say I've been impressed with it so far. 
If you regularly find yourself installing and upgrading software, I highly recommend you take a peep at Ninite, a great little online service-come-software tool for managing this process completely hands free.
To get up and running, first you'll need to visit ninite.com and select all the software packages you wish to include in your custom installer.
Recently we've seen a significant increase in the number of MDaemon servers we come across being used to send spam email, and we're finding that it's often via an authenticated SMTP session.
In continuation to our last post in September Tom's Hardware and Que Publishing have partnered to give away four free chapters from Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCs, 20th Edition....
STG is one of those tools that only performs the one job, but performs it very well indeed.
Simply put, STG is a real-time graphing utility for monitoring any device that supports SNMPv1 and v2 ( Simple Network Managment Protocol).
In this section of the blog, each week I'll be sharing with you one of the many software applications (often "freebies") that I find useful in my day-to-day role here at Zen Software.
This week I want to introduce HDTune Pro.
