Special's favorites (89)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

IsMyHdOK is a small program to easily check the performance of a Windows Volume (e.g. Partition). It is suitable for SSD, HDD and other drives.