"The biggest fire is the operating system," Thomas said. The free trial can handle up to 100 nodes, but additional free evaluation node monitoring will be provided by request, he said.

Ecora Software Corp. in Portsmouth, N.H., offers users a 30-day free trial of its Ecora Patch Manager 5.0, which uses a proprietary knowledge base to bring together technical service bulletins from Microsoft and Sun. The application automates the patch discovery and installation, according to Bryan Cote, a senior product manager. Most applications that run on top of the operating system today rely on proper time calls at the operating system level, so once the operating system's DST stamps are correct, the applications will be fine, he said.