We needed a xp pro pc running from the datacentre for downloading and local maintenance. No problems I thought however by default XP doesn’t seem to recognise the hard disks :
“Setup did not find any hard drives installed in your computer”
Well after googling the problem I stumbled across a website by Techhead and an article [...]

Not new information but all the same useful for either secure traffic or bypassing web cache restrictions.
First example is a socks proxy to allow you to secure web traffic over a wifi link or just avoiding web caching filters.
From unix, linux, *BSD or MacOSX type in :
ssh -N name@ssh_server -D 9999
or from windows download plink.exe [...]