Monthly Archives: June 2011

News News News

Posted by on June 20, 2011 No comments

The Bad News:

If you’re prompted by your web browser or JAVA if you’d like to run an application that this site is hosting, you can say yes or no - it’s just an idea I’ve decided to try and help provide funding for the site via the plausibly doomed BitCoin currency. If you find your CPU at 100% while on this page, this is why - I’m using your computer indirectly to generate revenue for the site. Once you leave the site, it will stop running. Since no one has ever donated a single cent to this project, it just had to be tried, even if the backlash is to remove it entirely.

Enough of that, then, let’s go on with the good news:

Work has begun on BootZilla v5.6, which will be doing away with most of the old scripting in lieu of using Ketarin, a multipurpose application downloader, which can be setup to post-process the files it gets using external applications.

The only “downfall” is that BootZilla v5.6 will need .NET 2.0 to be installed. This shouldn’t be a problem for ANYONE. It’s 2011, and time for .NET to be the mainstream Windows platform to develop applications like Ketarin on.

Here’s the progress so far with Ketarin in use, setup with a small selection of the tools found in bootzilla:


Screenshot showing development progress of BootZilla v5.6

So far, the downloader has been tested, and found to work beautifully as a replacement for BZUpdate and Wget, which is excellent, as it should resolve a lot of problems that have been the bane of BootZilla’s existence for a while now.

Version 5.99/6.0 has also begun development, firstly as a small addon to Windows PE 2.0/2.1/3.0, which will probably be migrated into a WinBuilder project later on during its development.

The Future

Posted by on June 19, 2011 No comments

I’ve been testing and using other tools out there, many like BootZilla, but a bit more polished, in some ways. I’m working on restructuring the entirety of the suite, wiping out most of the old batch scripting in lieu of a cleaner, more versatile solution. First things first, thanks to Foolish IT, I’ve been made aware of a neat .NET application that works as an updater for software apps, much like a combination of curl and wget, in a neat gui-based solution. Foolish IT also offers a neat tool named <b>D7</b>, which offers a lot of the same tools as BZ, in a simple GUI, instead of an HTML file. I’ve been testing it with a lot of systems lately, and have found that it can be used as a great replacement to my ancient html page launcher. I’ve also been intrigued by FalconFour’s UBCD, which is based on Hiren’s boot CD, which contains a lot of licensed software, but is extremely useful in an IT tech’s job. I’m thinking of creating a completely legal, free alternative to F4′s CD, which happens to be the original idea for BootZilla v6.

Here we are at a crossroad of sorts. I can continue to develop the suite as an abortion of batch scripts, or I can jump ship and start working on the final, more useful WindowsPE-based version 6, which has been a long time in planning. It’s really gotten to the point where the basic toolset I’ve offered for years is not all too useful anymore - many infections prevent booting up a system, but if you can gain access to the registry from another system, you can fix the system - that’s where I’m going with this project.

To keep the users I have right now, I’ll be releasing BootZilla a legacy edition, which will stay in the version 5.x land, and a ‘future tech’ version, which will start with version 6.0. The legacy version may only see 1-2 updates a year, while the v6 release will see between 3-10 releases/patches a year, if need be.