Tool Discs and USB Sticks 

Here is the article for my SEMCO presentation given on 8 December 2019. The links associated with the presentation can be found here.

The links ending in DL are for downloads. The rest are source articles and notes. For usage details, all of these utility suites have tutorials as text and/or YouTube videos—do a search on the name or dig into the site from where you downloaded it.

Rufus is a tool used to create a bootable USB drive from a .iso file. Not only is USB slightly faster, but many lapstops (and some PCs) no longer sport optical drives.

IngBurn is a CD/DVD burning utility. It's free and quite useful.

The Windows ISO trick is instructions on how to directly download the Microsoft Windows installation ISO file from Windows without the Media Creation Tool.

All discs are free, except for Parted Magic. The software it contains is free, but he puts a lot of work into it—and it is pretty much the gold standard for the genre. I pay for a yearly subscription.

I am not covering forensic or penetration discs here, but I will mention two of them: CAINE and Kali Linux. See DistroWatch for more info on those.