In praise of PLoP

The shortest posts I seem to have are always for the tools that are the quickest, most efficient and most effective. PLoP Bootmanager is one of those things, and for that reason, I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it.

A long time ago I kept Smart BootManager on hand, for times when a machine wouldn’t boot from a CD. Any more though, PLoP has supplanted it, and won a place in my little CD binder.

It’s mostly useful these days because I would rather not burn a bunch of CDs to get the Celeron to start. Naturally (or I guess I should say, originally) it lacks the ability to boot from a USB drive, but with a PLoP CD, I can boot from USB, floppy or any other media I can stick in the machine.

And on top of that, it has a cool techno font, a starfield background and fading zooming menus. (And yes, you can customize its behavior.) What could be cooler than that? 😉

Like everything, it’s not 100 percent perfect; in the past I have used PLoP to boot an external DVDRW over USB, but for example, with the Celeron, it doesn’t quite work. That I blame on the hardware though, and not PLoP itself.

But it’s something that works so well that there’s little I can say in addition. I recommend downloading and burning it to a CD, and keeping it in your closet for those times when you have an old Pentium II that needs a little coaxing. It’s a great tool to have and will save you mounds of time and money on CDs, and both of those things can only be good.