billon's favorites (230)

IrfanView is a viewer for a wide variety of image, audio and video formats. The program includes batch processing, creation of panoramic images, edition of multi-page TIFF files, lossless JPEG rotate/crop and effects such as sharpen and blur. Other tools such as screen capture, scanner, slideshow, plugin support and ability to capture icons from EXE or DLL.

Alternatively, IrfanView Portable is also available and updates drive letters and handles registry keys.

BinText is a file text scanner / extractor that helps find character strings buried in binary files. The program can extract text from any kind of file and display plain ASCII text, Unicode (double byte ANSI) text, as well as Resource strings. Additional useful information for each item is included in the "Advanced" mode. Uniquely, the program will show both the file offset and the memory offset of each string found.

Although primarily targeted for programmers, it can be used by anyone interested in ferreting out character strings buried within binary files.

Note: Although updated versions of the program exist, the 3.00 version is listed for reasons described in forums.

Process Hacker is a feature-packed tool for manipulating processes and services on your computer. Includes a simple, customized tree view, detailed performance graphs, list of network connections, comprehensive process list (including hidden), full control over processes, rootkit termination, and DLL controls.

Alternatively, Process Hacker Portable is stealth.

Autoruns shows programs that run during system bootup or login, as well as entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility.

A 64-bit version is available (within the folder).

Alternatively, Autoruns Portable is stealth and will only show the EULA once.

Everything is a powerful search tool that locates files and folders by file name instantly, and includes an FTP and Web server interface. It also can search files by their contents. Unlike Windows search, Everything initially displays all files and folders on your computer. You simply type in part of the desired file name to limit what files and folders are displayed instantly. The more you type, the more specific the list becomes.

Note that the instant-search capability only works on NTFS/ReFS-formatted drives and only uses file and folder names in a file index. The program can separately catalog non-NTFS/ReFS and network servers for searching on a schedule.

Process Explorer is an advanced task manager. It is an indispensable tool for both beginners and power users. I use it all the time to kill tasks that refuse to be killed, or find what which processes are still holding on to a particular file or DLL so it refuses to be deleted.

Alternatively, Process Explorer Portable is also available, which is stealth.

FastStone Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen including windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web pages. It has innovative features such as a floating Capture Panel, hotkeys, resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing, e-mailing, screen magnifier and many more.

Reported to function in Windows 7 and in Linux under WINE.

Note: FastStone Capture went payware starting from v5.4 so I have made the last freeware version available (v5.3) for direct download as the license agreement does not prohibit redistribution.

Core Temp is a small footprint yet powerful program to monitor processor temperature and other vital system information. The program can track temperatures on individual processor cores, useful for advanced diagnostics or checking that cooling tools are functioning properly.

ServiWin utility displays and provides access to controls for a list of installed drivers and services on your system. For some, a variety of information is displayed such as file description, version, product name, company that created the driver file and more. The program allows the stop, start, restart, pause and continue function of a service or driver, as well as changing the startup type of service or driver (automatic, manual, disabled, boot or system).

A list of services and drivers can be saved to file or a view HTML report of installed services/drivers can be opened in your default browser.

7-Zip is an archive manager that can view and create a wide variety of formats. The program includes folder favorites, optional two-pane view, checksum calculator, file split/combine capability and more. Individual archives can be created with high speed or high compression settings, update options (including update, add/replace, synchronize), split volumes and more. Archives can be secured with standard zip or more secure AES encryption.

Although the official archiver for the open, high-compression "7z" format, the program also supports the creation of multiple formats including ZIP, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR and WIM. It will extract a long list of other formats, among them RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, RPM, VHD, VMDK etc. Even more formats are supported through third-party plugins. Supports many world languages.

Additionally, to use alternative toolbar and file icons, 7-Zip Theme Manager is available.

7-Zip Portable is a wrapper from PortableApps.com, auto-detecting 32 or 64-bit automatically. Alternatively, X-7zip is also available.

There is also a 7-Zip standalone console version.

CurrPorts displays the list of all currently opened networking ports on your local computer. For each TCP/IP and UDP port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description and so on), the time that the process was created and the user that created it.

In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file, XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. The program will automatically mark with pink suspicious ports owned by unidentified applications (applications without version information and icons).

Clipboardic is a small utility that monitors clipboard (whenever you copy or cut) activity and automatically saves the data into a Windows clipboard file. When you need the copied data again, you can simply select the right clipboard file, and Clipboardic will automatically insert it into the clipboard (to paste).

Clipboardic also allows you to easily share the clipboard data between multiple computers on your local network.

Resource Hacker is an utility to view, modify, rename, add, delete and extract resources in 32-bit and 64-bit Windows executables and resource files (*.res). The program can modify program icons as they appear in the taskbar, Start Menu and Desktop, among many other things.

It incorporates an internal resource script compiler and decompiler.

QTranslate is a front-end for various translation websites. Open the main window to enter or paste text or simply select text and press a hotkey for a popup translation window. The program also has the ability to search in offline XDXF dictionaries, speech recognition, text to speech synthesis, image text recognition, spell checking, virtual keyboard, search the web and more.

Supported translation services are Google Translate, Bing Translator, Promt, Babylon, Yandex.Translate, youdao, Baidu, Naver and DeepL; dictionaries: ABBYY Lingvo Live, Babylon Dictionary, Google, ImTranslator, Multitran, Oxford Learner Dictionary, Reverso, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia and WordReference.

Although the hotkeys can be modified, the following are available by default:

• Show the translation window: CTRL+Q (press CTRL twice for the main window)
• Speak text: Ctrl+E
• Perform a web search: Ctrl+W

GitHub user clsid' fork of Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC) is a lightweight player with broad format support. It includes keyboard shortcuts, audio/video controls, a web interface for remote control and more. The program is derived from Media Player Classic (MPC), a media player that mimics the interface of Windows Media Player 6.4, and adds support for EVR rendering, H.264 and VC-1 video hardware acceleration, bugfixes, additional languages, decoders and more.

Note: this is a fork of the original version that ceased development in 2017.

DevManView is an alternative to the standard Windows Device Manager. It displays all devices and their properties in a flat table, instead of a hierarchical treeview. In addition to displaying the devices of your local computer, DevManView also lets you view the device list of another computer on your network, as long as you have administrator access rights to that computer.

DevManView can also load the devices list from external instance of Windows and disable unwanted devices. This feature can be useful if you have trouble starting Windows on a particular machine and you need to disable a problematic device.

TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of most audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Album info available via online databases like gnudb, Discogs or MusicBrainz and includes a built-in audio player.

Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4 (iTunes) tags. Includes powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features and a playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML, Excel or any user-defined format.

WhatInStartup displays the list of all applications that are loaded automatically when Windows starts up. It allows you to easily disable or delete unwanted programs that runs in your Windows startup. You can use it on your currently running instance of Windows, as well as you can use it on external instance of Windows in another drive. Additionally, the program will "ban" programs from re-adding themselves to startup.

AnyBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / Blu-ray disc burning software with most common features. Includes the ability to burn files/image to disc, create an image from disc, drive info, disc copy, image file conversion (e.g. ISO -> BIN/CUE) and erase rewritable. Can also burn audio files (MP3, FLAC, APE, M4A, WAV, WMA etc.) to audio CD.

GifCam is a handy and reliable application designed to record the screen and to convert the recordings into GIF format. It supports to define the recording frame rate, to select the color quality, to add a text in frames, capture the cursor and much more.

Great for demonstrations, how-tos and bug testing.

MediaInfo displays a variety of technical and metadata/tag information from audio/video files. It features many different available layouts to display the information, as well as the ability to create custom layouts. The program can be used to find missing codecs or get more information about a given media file.

OpenTTD is a business simulation game in which the player aims to earn money through transportation of passengers and freight by road, rail, water and air. The program is based upon the popular game Transport Tycoon Deluxe, written by Chris Sawyer for Microprose and attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features.

Notes: Size mentioned herein includes all basic game graphic and sound sets (OpenGFX [graphics], OpenSFX [sounds], and OpenMSX [music]). Releases for Windows versions before Vista can be found here or here.

AdiIRC is an IRC client with multi-server support and a customizable interface. It offers all the standard IRC features including private chats, basic Identd features, system informations, SSL, IPv6, chat logging and DCC Chat/Transfers.

It also offers now playing support for various media players, advanced scripting, themes, MTS themes, plugins, and dockable/undockable activity monitors that lets you monitor many channels at once.

Note: Additional Themes and Language files are available from the homepage.

BulkFileChanger allows you to gather a list of files via drag-and-drop, explorer, or wild card searches. Users can then execute a command, change properties (time/date/hidden/read-only etc.), export file list, or copy/move files to another location.

RawReg allows edition of offline registry hives. It can be used (for example) to edit BCD hives, NTUSER, software and many other registry hives found in versions after Windows 2000, including those created by the security tool Sandboxie. Information is provided on the physical offset position of each registry key on the hive file, useful for debugging a registry hive with the aid of an hexadecimal editor.

The program can browse the registry, change value data, edit value titles, and show a map with information on the data in each area.

mp3DirectCut is a small tool for editing MPEG audio directly. You can remove parts, change the volume, split files or copy regions to new files, all without the need to decompress your MP3 into PCM/WAV. This saves work, encoding time and disk space. In addition, there is no quality loss to edited files.

HTTPNetworkSniffer is a packet sniffer tool that captures all requests/responses sent between the Web browser and the Web server and displays them in a simple table. For every HTTP request, the following information is displayed: Host Name, HTTP method (GET, POST, HEAD), URL Path, User Agent, Response Code, Response String, Content Type, Referer, Content Encoding, Transfer Encoding, Server Name, Content Length, Cookie String and more...

You can easily select one or more HTTP information lines, and then export them to text/html/xml/csv file or copy them to the clipboard and then paste them into Excel.

PhotoDemon is a fast, feature-rich photo editor with rotate, resize, crop, etc. and a variety of color, contrast, filters and other graphics tools. The program also allows adding text, a metadata viewer/editor, on-canvas paint tool, layers, screenshot too, and works with common graphics formats including BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PSD, JP2, JXR, PPM, TGA and WEBP.

The program also supports macro edition and batch processing.

CountryTraceRoute helps to diagnose the path and delay of information across the internet. The program is similar to the command-line tracert but much faster. CountryTraceRoute also displays the country of the owner of every IP address found in the traceroute, and ASN Network Carrier information per hop.

After the traceroute is completed, you can select all items (Ctrl+A) and then save them into csv/tab-delimited/html/xml file with 'Save Selected Items' option (Ctrl+S) or copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C) and then paste the result into Excel or other spreadsheet application.

FolderChangesView monitors the folder, disk drive, or even remote network share to see every file that is being modified, created, or deleted. Requires read permissions to the selected drive/folder.

AkelPad is a plain text editor focused on speed and a small size. The program includes unicode support, available single-document and tabbed interfaces, unlimited file size, and multi-level undo, etc.
Support plugins.

Alternatively, AkelPad Portable portablizes recent files and search history and has both the 32- and 64-bit versions together and chooses the right one. X-AkelPad is also available.

ImgBurn writes most types of image files for CD, DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray burning. It supports the latest writers (including booktype/bitsetting on many of the major ones such as BenQ, LiteOn, NEC, Plextor, Sony etc.). You can also ImgBurn to erase/format your rewritable media.

Includes CD-Text editing, disk imaging, disc testing, verification (that files are exactly the same as those on the disc) and supports many world languages.

Does not support multisessions.

SumatraPDF is a lightweight, tabbed document reader for a variety of formats. Includes a wide variety of views including table of contents, rotation, facing pages, book view (2 pages side-by-side), full screen and presentation mode. Includes support for bookmarks, command-line arguments, hotkeys, and more. Additionally, SumatraPDF can function as a portable browser plugin. Supported formats include PDF, eBooks (EPUB, MOBI, FB2/FB2Z, PDB, TCR), Comic Books (CBZ/CBR/CBT/CB7Z), DJVU, CHM, XPS, TXT, images (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, J2K, WEBP, TGA) and PostScript documents (PS/EPS, AI, PRN - requires Ghostscript).

Alternatively, Sumatra Portable adjusts recently used and most used file paths.

HashMyFiles is a small utility that allows you to generate unique file identifiers (hashes) using a variety of popular checks. These can help determine if a file has been modified or corrupted, as well as help determine the file's reputation by submitting to the VirusTotal database for malware analysis.

Formats supported range form fast to secure with CRC32, MD5, SHA1/-256/-512/-384. The various hashing information can be saved to a report (text/HTML/XML/CSV/TSV) that includes name, path, dates, file size, version and other info.

CPU-Z gathers and displays information on some of the main components of the machine, including CPU, motherboard, memory, GPU and operating system.

SQLiteSpy is a fast and compact database manager for SQLite. It reads SQLite 3 files and executes SQL against them with a graphical user interface that makes it very easy to explore, analyze and manipulate those databases.

NetworkTrafficView is a monitoring tool that captures information passing through your network adapter and displays general traffic statistics. Packet statistics are grouped by the Ethernet Type, IP Protocol, Source/Destination Addresses and Source/Destination ports.

A variety of information is displayed on each line including Ethernet Type (IPv4, IPv6, ARP), IP Protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP), Source Address, Destination Address, Source Port, Destination Port, Service Name (http, ftp and so on), Packets Count, Total Packets Size, Total Data Size, Data Speed, Maximum Data Speed, Average Packet Size, First/Last Packet Time, Duration and process ID/Name.

Audacity is a multi-track sound recorder and editor with support for most audio formats and sophisticated effects such as noise removal and studio reverb. Users can record live audio, compress or convert file types, as well as cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.

Cross platform with clients available for Mac and Linux.

Alternatively, Audacity Portable and an outdated X-Audacity are also available.

XnView is a feature-rich, customizable media viewer that supports more than 400 formats. Includes batch image converter/renamer as well as basic transformations (rotate, filters, effects, colors, multi-page etc.). Various viewing settings include tabbed interface, fullscreen, slideshow, web page, contact sheet, image compare and filmstrip layout. Includes scanner support, screen capture, Photoshop's 8bf plugins, image search, histogram, metadata viewer, automatic crop (deletes background), watermark, flash export and more. It can also store thumbnails to a temp folder rather than each image folder accessed, which is handy for portable use.

Alternatively, XnView Portable is pre-configured and automatically supports PDF interpreter/rendering engine Ghostscript Portable.

fre:ac (pronounced "freak") is a feature-rich audio tool set featuring audio encoding and conversion, CD ripper, playlist and metadata editor. The program supports most popular audio formats such as MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG and FLAC, as well as support for a long list of additional converters such as Quicktime and Shorten. For CDs, the program supports reliable conversion (CD Paranoia), online databases (CDDB/GNUdb) and CDText, automatically writing song information metadata. The program is optimized for multi-core systems, making conversions as fast as possible.

Cross-platform (Mac, Linux, FreeBSD). Available in many world languages. Alternatively, fre:ac Portable automatically adjusts paths.

RegDllView displays the list of all registered dll/ocx/exe files (COM registration). For each registered file, you can view the last date/time that it was registered, and the list of all registration entries (CLSID/ProgID).

The program also allows you to unregister dll/ocx files that you don't need on your system anymore. If you have dll/ocx files that don't exist on your system anymore but their registration entries still exist in the Registry, you can manually remove these entries by using 'Delete All Entries For Selected Files' option.

WebSiteSniffer is a packet sniffer tool that captures all the components of a given Web site and stores them in a folder of your choice. A variety of file types can be captured including HTML, Text, XML, CSS, Video/Audio, Images, Scripts, and Flash (.swf) files.

While capturing the Web site files, the main window of WebSiteSniffer displays general statistics about the downloaded files for every Web site / host name, including the total size of all files (compressed and uncompressed) and total number of files for every file type (HTML, Text, Images, and so on).

Detect It Easy (DIE) is a packer identifier in order to help define a file type. Comes in handy to analyze a file, determine its type and packer.

LastActivityView collects information from various sources on a running system and displays a log of actions made by the user and events that occurred on the machine. Events include running .exe files, any open/save dialog-boxes, opening file/folder from Explorer or other software, software installation, system shutdown/start, application or system crash, network connection/disconnection and more.

You can easily export this information into csv/tab-delimited/xml/html file or copy it to the clipboard and then paste into Excel or other software.

FocusOn Image Viewer lets you view, organize, and make changes to images without modifying the original. The program includes edition tools like color, brightness, rotation, frames, and various filters. Thumbnail views, broad image format support, easy sharing, and metadata tools are also available. Batch operations are available for modifying or renaming any number of files, as well as automatic archiving and image management.

NOTE: This program has mostly been replaced by PDF-XChange Editor (also portable), which is actively updated and contains additional features.

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PDF-XChange Viewer is a feature-rich program that displays multiple PDF documents within a tabbed interface. Edit features include the ability to rotate documents, add comments/annotations to any PDF file, apply custom stamps from any image/PDF file/Windows clipboard, mark-up pages with text and objects, and type directly on any PDF page in "Typewriter" mode.

The program supports exporting to BMP/JPEG/TIFF/PNG etc., or extracting text from a PDF page/file. Additional features include capturing the document with the snapshot tool (copies an area to clipboard), measuring tools for distance, area and perimeter, and more. A recommended picture-to-text OCR plugin is available (thanks Bruce) as is a PDF help file.

Reported as functional on Mac/Linux under WINE. Alternatively, PDF-XChange Viewer Portable adjusts paths, with an OCR plugin and help file available from the website as separate downloads.

For 64-bit, see forum post

HamMultiPlayer displays one or more media files for analysis in real time. It can be used to find, move, delete or preview any video/audio file. The program can scan drives and directories, and then sort a generated list. Intended primarily to help videographers look through lots of footage, the program can also make it easy to find and eliminate duplicated or similar files.

The program uses Mplayer and MediaInfo Library to decode and display files, playing everything Mplayer can play.

Functional in 64-bit and supports multiple monitors.

ShellExView displays the details of shell extensions installed on your machine and allows you to easily enable/disable each shell extension. ShellExView comes in handy for solving problems caused by third party shell extensions.

Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a tool for creating icons, animated or static cursors and other small images. Can extract icons and cursors from executable files and icon libraries, batch convert image files to icons or other image formats and supports advanced selection handling (marquee, lasso and wand tools, saving/loading selections from files). Offers various gradient styles for filling shapes, and includes many filters such as remove matte, drop shadow, inner/outer glow and bevel etc.

The program opens and saves in ICO, CUR, ANI, PNG, XPM, BMP, JPEG, WebP and TGA formats and creates icons and cursors up to 256x256 @ 32-bit, which can also be PNG-compressed for use in Vista and above.

Include Greenfish Image Converter (for processing TIFF and SVG files), which requires .NET Framework 3.5.

A 64-bit version is available (within the folder). Alternatively, a PortableApps version is also available: Greenfish Icon Editor Pro Portable.