I've made plenty of videos about useful Windows programs in the past.
But there is one man who has single handedly created hundreds of some of the most useful
tools out there, being rejoiced by IT Professionals and Sysadmins everywhere.
I'm talking about Nirsoft, created by one guy, Nir Sofer, hopefully I pronounced that
right.
I've mentioned some of these tools in previous videos, but there are just so many I figured
I'd make a dedicated video about some of the most interesting and useful ones, in my opinion
at least.
Pretty much all the tools have one specific purpose, ranging from "super obscure, why
would you need this" to "my god why is this not built into Windows".
Each tool is standalone and portable, no install required, and you can download the tools individually,
and the download link is usually hidden a bit far down the page though.
But if you want to just download all of them there is the "NirLauncher" which lets you
look through them organized all in one place.
Do be aware though that a handful of the tools will be falsely flagged by antivirus programs,
because while they are all safe, some do stuff that Windows is gonna think is really suspicious,
such as viewing the product key for your Windows install, or exporting all the passwords saved
in your web browser.
If you don't care about those tools then you can just let your antivirus delete them, which
it probably will by default, or you can add them as an exception.
Alright so first let's go over my personal favorite tools that I actually use quite a
bit.
Then I'll go over other tools that I haven't really used, but are useful and might come
in handy, and then finally some that are just cool but very random.
Oh and at the end I'll also mention some other sets of useful programs from other websites,
sort of like Nirsoft but from elsewhere.
Ok so first up we have USBLogView, which right now is probably the one I find most useful.
It basically just keeps a log of whenever a USB Device gets plugged in or unplugged.
Now you might think, "uhh how is that useful"?
Well how many times have you been using your computer, and randomly you hear that Windows
device disconnect sound, and wondered, "wait what just disconnected?"
Or "what has been connected"?
Now, you can know.
I have this tool startup with Windows and run in the background all the time, so if
that ever happens, I can just open it up and see what's going on, and if it happens regularly,
it tells me that maybe I should investigate the problem further.
To have it start with Windows, or have really any program start with Windows, you can use
the special Startup folder.
To get to it, search the start menu for 'Run', then enter "shell:startup", which will take
you right to it.
Then just create a shortcut to the program and put it in this folder.
Anything in here automatically runs at startup.
I'd also then recommend you go to options and enable "Put Icon on Tray" and "Start As
Hidden", that way it stays out of the way until you need it.
And it's really lightweight, it only uses about 3 Megabytes of RAM in the background.
Next up we have IconsExtract.
The purpose of this one is to simply extract the icons from a file, whether it's an exe
that just has one icon, or a DLL file with many, such as the shell32.dll file which stores
most of the Windows icons you're familiar with.
This is especially useful for me when I want to use some Windows icon in a video or a thumbnail,
and I want the highest resolution available, not just a screenshot.
What you do is you put in the path of whatever file has the icons you want, or what's really
nice, is if you don't know where the icons are, you can just pick say the System32 folder
with a wildcard to search any file, then it will search through everything and find them
all.
You can also have it search through subfolders, and even find cursor icons too.
If you choose all that, for me it found over 5300 different cursors and icons.
Scrolling through you probably recognize a bunch of them.
Then you can select as many as you want, and right click, and hit "save selected icons",
and then select the folder you want to extract them to.
Do note that it will extract them as an ICO file, so to use it anywhere you'll usually
need to convert it to PNG.
There are websites that will do that, but I actually prefer a different program called
"IconViewer", which isn't from Nirsoft, but it adds a tab to the file properties menu
that lets you save the icons in any resolution, usually 256x256 is the max though.
Ok moving on, we have "ShellMenuView".
This lets you control a lot of what appears in the Windows context menu for certain filetypes.
For example, I use Media Player Classic just for playing videos usually, but it annoyingly
adds options to "Play with MPC" and "Add to Playlist" when you right click any folder,
which is a feature I literally never use, and it just clutters up the context menu.
So what I can do is find those entries in ShellMenuView.
In the "Extensions", "FileType", and "Type Description" columns, it tells you where the
option will appear under, so for these that appear when right clicking a folder, you can
see the FileType is a directory.
If it only appears for a certain filetype, you'll also see that too.
So if you have a certain context menu option that shows up for certain filetypes you don't
want, this will let you hide them.
You can also sort by 'Disabled' and see which ones you have disabled already and re-enable
them if you want.
Just note that this won't let you disable everything in the context menu.
There are other ways a program may add itself to the context menu that this might not work
on.
In that case your best bet is to look for a setting in the program itself that hopefully
lets you disable the context menu option, which many programs actually do.
Alright we got a couple more in this section, and next up we have DevManView.
This one is more for power users, and it's basically a more detailed version of the Device
Manager built into Windows.
In device manager you have to really dig through the different layers to find the device you're
looking for, and if you want the details you have to dig through more properties menus
to find it.
But with DevManView, everything is laid out in one massive table, and lets you search
for something directly, which Device Manager amazingly can't do.
And it shows you really everything about it.
Here's a list of all the possible columns of data that you can have it show.
This might be useful say, if some driver name keeps showing up in error messages and you
want to know what device uses it, then you can just search the driver name and check
which device it is.
I'm sure there some advanced uses for it that I can't even imagine, but I'm sure some of
you might find more uses for it.
Ok now the next tool is called USBDeview, and it's basically the same idea as the last
one, except specifically for USB devices, so I won't spend too much time on it.
This does have different options and settings, and can show you more info about each device.
Whereas DevManView has 26 possible data columns, USBDeview has 40.
But again, it's only for USB devices.
So if you're looking for something specifically USB related, this one is especially helpful.
Alright onto the next set of tools that I haven't had a need for yet, but I'll keep
them around because I just think they're cool, or I could see them coming in handy at some
point.
First we have CurrPorts.
This lets you see all current connections your computer is making, including what port
each program is listening on.
This might be helpful if you just want to check if there's anything making connections
that you don't want.
Like a lot of programs automatically check for updates, and maybe you want to see which
ones do without asking.
Then whatever the reason though, you could make a firewall rule to block it.
The next program is SpecialFoldersView.
This one is just kinda neat, it shows you a list of so-called "Special Folders" in Windows,
which is literally any location that serves some special purpose in Windows.
You've got the different system directories, AppData and Local AppData, the recent files
folder, cookies and fonts folders, stuff like that.
I'm not totally sure if this is an official list the program looks up, or just a hardcoded
list the developer came up with, but either way they're nice to know about.
Next up we have BlueScreenView.
Like the name suggests, this will show you some additional info about recent blue screens
of death your computer has experienced.
I actually just had one recently and it is indeed in here.
It shows you a whole bunch of columns with different info that is mostly way beyond my
comprehension, but if you know what you're doing it could probably at least give you
some clues about what the problem was.
The next tool is called RegistryChangesView.
With this you can create a snapshot of the registry, then later see what changes have
been made to the registry since your snapshot.
This could be useful for troubleshooting, like maybe you install a program that you
think messed up your computer somehow via the registry.
You could open up a sandbox or fresh virtual machine, and install the program while using
RegistryChangeView to see exactly how it affects the registry when installing.
If you know what you're doing, you might recognize some of the things that could be related to
your problem and change them back.
Of course, this IS only if you know what you're doing, and remember to always make a backup
of the registry before messing with it.
Alright we got a couple more in this section, and this next one is called LastActivityView.
And this one was really interesting and surprising to me.
When you run it, it shows you all sorts of activity and actions taken by the user and
the system itself recently.
This includes stuff like exe files being run in the background, but also when you open
and view a folder in Explorer, open or save a file, if there's a crash, stuff like that.
But what's surprising is it doesn't actually monitor anything like you'd see with Process
Monitor, a different program from the SysInternals suite.
Instead, it uses various logs stored by Windows itself.
This means when you run it, you'll see activity that occurred before you ran the program,
some of which goes back days or even weeks.
Though the more recent activity is way more detailed, probably because some of the logs
it uses don't go back very far.
So this one could be useful if you're troubleshooting, and want to see what some program is trying
to access if it's causing a problem, or maybe just see who's been using your computer.
Finally for this section we have AdvancedRun.
This lets you run any program with all sorts of advanced settings applied to it.
So you could start it minimized, or have the window at a specific location, with different
compatibility modes, as a different user including system accounts, or even with a set of custom
environment variables applied.
You can also do the same command prompt and powershell commands, not just exe files.
Not sure when I might need this, but I could see myself needing it for some obscure problem
in the future.
Ok now a couple tools that are very cool but pretty random.
This first one being RunAsDate.
And it allows you to run a program with any date and time applied to it, without changing
the date and time of your whole system.
This might be especially useful to developers for testing purposes, but I'm not sure I can
think of anything else.
Some of you might think to use it to get around free trials, but know that a lot of software
will use other checks for stuff like that.
And finally we have one more, but remember I have other tools to mention that aren't
from Nirsoft.
So this final tool is called "ControlMyMonitor", and it lets you control certain settings for
your monitor without using the on-screen controls.
You can see it shows a list of all the settings, the current values and possible or maximum
values.
It won't be able to change everything though.
You'll see there's a column that has the Read-Write capabilities, and only the ones that have
Read+Write are the ones you can change with this.
Other ones might be locked off by the manufacturer, or might just be informational, not actual
settings.
So if you change your settings on your monitor a lot, you could for example, create a shortcut
that runs this program with a parameter to do that thing quickly.
And by the way most of the programs I've mentioned can also be run via the command line with
parameters too.
So those are the Nirsoft tools I found especially cool, but of course let me know in the comments
if I missed any really good ones, I'm sure you will.
So now let me go over a few other places that also have good tools.
These are actually listed on the Nirsoft site as additional downloads for the Nirsoft launcher.
I won't go through these in detail for the sake of time, you can just browse them yourself.
One is called joeware.net, this also has a bunch of free tools made by one guy, though
most of these are probably not useful for the average person.
A lot of them have to do with Active Directory or managing computers in an enterprise setting,
stuff like that.
I won't go through these individually, but I figured I'd mention it for you IT professionals
out there who might have a use for them.
Another site with a bunch of free tools I saw people talking about was Mitec.cz.
There's tools like a Hex Editor and JSON and XML Viewers, there's some system tools, network
tools, and a whole bunch else.
There is a mix of free programs and either paid programs or paid versions, but it looks
like most if not all of the paid tools are free for private non-commercial use.
So of course if you're going to use anything professionally, be sure to actually pay for
it.
And finally, I need to at least mention Sysinternals.
Though I've made a whole video about that before which I'll have pop out here.
But it's basically a massive suite of free Windows tools published by Microsoft, and
I think really every computer enthusiast should look through and know about these.
So that pretty much covers it though.
If you were bored at your computer before, you now have a whole bunch of cool tools you
can try out and check out.
Again, if you think I should have mentioned another cool tool from Nirsoft, let me know,
I might add a section with those to the description.
If you enjoyed this video, maybe click on my channel and take a look at my other content,
and maybe consider subscribing.
If you do be sure to click the bell to enable notifications, I only upload once or twice
a week so you don't want those getting lost in the rest of your subscriptions feed.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is this video about Sysinternals
and 13 of the coolest tools from that.
So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.