
NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities - turrini
https://www.nirsoft.net/
======
da_chicken
The most useful tool I've seen from here is BlueScreenView
([https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html)).

Blue screens on Windows aren't remotely as common as people think they are,
but this tool will look at your dump file and can tell you very quickly what
caused the error (typically, which driver). Back in the day this helped to
identify a problem from the network driver that was affecting a certain subset
of our workstations and allowed us to determine just how widespread the scope
of the problem was. Turned out the image maintainer had used the wrong network
driver.

We could have used WinDbg to do this, but at the time you had to install the
whole damn Windows SDK to get it. This was a single executable and a library
(I think).

~~~
sbr464
For me, there was one that would transfer/edit the autocomplete files in
Outlook, when formatting or transferring to a new computer, or fixing Exchange
migration issues. Previously with IT client work (2002-2015 before cloud email
took over) it was a godsend.

~~~
da_chicken
N2KEdit. Yeah, that's a good one, too. Another case of an automated feature
becoming too smart for it's own good.

~~~
dkrikun
winlister for me. It is like process explorer for windows. When you develop
something window related and you have no idea where is a window -- winlister
can tell you whether it is hidden, or maybe have left-top out of the monitor

------
valgaze
Nir Sofer:
[http://nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html](http://nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html)

“In the beginning, NirSoft was hosted in some "free" Web hosting services like
Tripod and ‪multiservers.com‬ Unfortunately, these "free" Web sites produced a
fair amount of annoying popup ads and some of them even tried to install
unwanted Spywares on the computer of the site visitors. Also, after my site
became pretty popular, they disabled my hosting account because I used too
much resources on their server. In August 2004, after suffering from all these
free services, I decided to purchase a domain for my site (‪nirsoft.net‬) and
host it in a non-free hosting service, in order make my Web site more
reliable, friendly and secured. In the days that I started with ‪nirsoft.net‬
domain, my site was already popular more than an average Web site, with more
than 90,000 unique visitors and 1.5 million hits in a month”

~~~
shmerl
I agree, there is no reason for such tools to be closed source, but this looks
mostly historic.

Developers coming from Windows background were historically less open source
friendly, or simply didn't even consider such idea, even if they intended for
their tools to be used and distributed without restrictions.

Another such known example are Windows Sysinternals tools by Mark Russinovich.

------
Retr0spectrum
I love these tools, but my one "complaint" is that they're not open source.

I often find myself searching "how to find X in Windows", and the answer is to
run one of these tools. But what I really want to know is how the tool does
it.

~~~
Const-me
Why would you want source code for that? WinAPI is visible in dependency
viewers. File system operations visible in process monitor. Same with registry
access. WMI queries are visible in event viewer (simple setup is required).
Network activity is visible in sniffers.

Even when source code is available, these tools are both easier to use
(reading source code can be very time consuming for large projects), and they
give more accurate results.

By the way, sometimes I use these tools when I debug or troubleshoot my own
software.

Source code only helps for simple programs. For sufficiently complex software,
looking at source code increases development time instead of helping.

~~~
papermachete
I don't understand the thesis - releasing the source code costs nothing and
the user can choose whether to look at it or not. They could've spent the time
apologising for virus ""false alarms"" publishing the code instead. That way
one can trivially look through it instead of wasting time on different
analyzers.

~~~
Const-me
> releasing the source code costs nothing

When you release code, you need to do following.

1\. Ensure it builds. Old software can only be built with old compilers, with
old Windows SDK. Sometimes they also rely on old custom build tools. Other
times builds requires manual steps.

2\. Ensure you have not violated any copyrights or patents. The relevant laws
are ridiculous these days, potentially, you can get in legal trouble even by
copy-pasting stuff from stackoverflow.

3\. Ideally, that it comes with documentation/comments, at least minimal.

Neither of these are free, they’re quite time consuming. Speaking from
experience, I did release a few things, e.g. [https://github.com/Const-
me/EsentSerialize/](https://github.com/Const-me/EsentSerialize/)

> That way one can trivially look through it

Looking through is not enough. To be sure, you need to build the software and
run the binaries you’ve built. Building third-party code, especially old one,
can be very hard: dependencies, build environment, mismatched OS versions, and
thousand more papercuts. I sometimes spending a whole day just to build some
third-party project that I need to use. BTW I’ve been programming for living
for couple decades now.

Even if it builds, security audit of a program longer than a couple pages of
code is very non-trivial. If you’ll ask “how do you know they are longer than
a couple pages?” the answer is “because GUI”. Despite user friendly, GUI
usually require substantial amount of code. That’s probably the main reason
why open source community is reluctant to create GUI apps despite users
obviously prefer them over CLI.

~~~
papermachete
I only see a potential problem with No. 2. The rest seems like a non-issue.
Nobody is forcing the creator to spend his time writing extra documentation or
build instructions - just post it and let the community sort it through. Just
as nobody is forcing people to sit and figure out the code - some are just
interested in how the tool works and why AV software is really handing out
""false positives"". Personally, I just want to skim over it and see his style
of writing and commenting.

~~~
CJefferson
I've had plenty of people swear at me because open source software I release
won't build for them. It gets tiring and puts me in a bad mood all day.

~~~
mixmastamyk
So have some requirements and make sure it builds. File any other complaints
in NUL.

~~~
Stratoscope
And then you get a reputation for ignoring your users.

Some days you just can't win.

~~~
CamperBob2
"Users" = "People who pay me."

Everybody else can go take a long walk off a short pier, if they're going to
send angry emails about not being able to build something they didn't pay me
for.

------
andai
NirLauncher is a portable software package containing over 200 of these
utilities. [https://launcher.nirsoft.net/](https://launcher.nirsoft.net/)

And here's the top 10, sorted by downloads
[https://www.nirsoft.net/top_utilities_downloads.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/top_utilities_downloads.html)

~~~
disillusioned1
WSCC (Windows System Control Center) is a launcher/updater/manager for both
NirSoft and Sysinternals. [http://www.kls-soft.com/wscc/](http://www.kls-
soft.com/wscc/)

------
ebg13
My favorite part of the NirSoft website is the antivirus issues section of his
blog.

[https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-
issues/](https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/)

------
myself248
Every time I see this posted somewhere, I'm delighted to have sent Nir Sofer a
few bucks through his Donate page.

I haven't actually used these tools in years -- I'm mostly off the Windows
bandwagon now -- but back when I was referring to them constantly, it was
wonderful to be able to say "thanks" for all the time he saved me.

------
seriousaccount1
I absolutely love these tools. Being in digital forensics, these tools feel
like such a nice gift to our DFIR community. By the off chance Nir is reading
this: thank you so much for all your effort en dedication!

~~~
m-p-3
Those, combined with Sysinternals tools, are a must in IT support.

------
darpa_escapee
This reminds me of, and has me nostalgic about, TinyApps[1].

[1] [https://tinyapps.org/](https://tinyapps.org/)

~~~
dzek69
it's wonderful how tiny these apps are. complete e-mail client with full gui?
512KB.

in times where typical app is bloated and weights as much as current chromium
(because it is chromium/electron) it's nice to see such beauties

we've lost the art of programming in rush for fast development and making
products just for sell

------
weinzierl
I used these for years. Especially the Windows handles checker I found
incredibly useful.

That being said: When I recently recommended it to a friend he complained
about virus scanner warnings. When we ran the tool through Virus Total we had
a considerable amount of warnings and these were not only from the heuristic
checkers.

I have considerable trust in Nirsoft and maybe these warnings are wrong but on
the other hand I have confidence in Virus Total too.

~~~
andrew3726
They have a section on their Website about the AV issues.

[https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-
issues/](https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/)

~~~
weinzierl
Thanks, I never came across that.

~~~
Doubl
Just learned on his blog that Google owns virustotal. Which is fine I suppose

------
sctb
Another discussion from about a year ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16851021).

------
rkagerer
Love the NirSoft tools, especially the way they're self-contained to a handful
of files and run without installers.

------
ggm
Netinfo?

Stop using WHOIS. Start using RDAP. it is web cacheable, its JSON, and it has
302 redirection steering.

The RIRs are almost certainly throttling your WHOIS query if you walk the
address space.

------
blackrock
I noticed his Donate link to PayPal.

Do this guy actually get any reasonable donation money here, to help with his
software development effort, or web hosting fees?

Does any freeware software writers actually make any money from donations?

However, on the flip side, I continue to see articles of people selling their
art on instagram [1].

[1] ([https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/sophie-tea-is-
no...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/sophie-tea-is-now-a-
multimillionaire-after-forging-a-successful-career-as-an-artist/news-
story/69112ce62d25069797729f61ab0ecafd))

------
pndy
I'm using these along with Sysinternals and Windows System Control Center [1]
as launcher for both tools. NirSoft has own launcher but WSCC combines both
tools sets along with Windows built-in programs

Edit: seems WSCC has been updated and it also includes MiTeC [2] tools as
well, which are also interesting.

[1] - [http://www.kls-soft.com/wscc/](http://www.kls-soft.com/wscc/) [2] -
[http://mitec.cz/](http://mitec.cz/)

------
superasn
Their multimonitor tool is so useful and I still use it till date to switch
between my sitting and standing desk.

------
MrXOR
Nir Sofer is a great programmer. He can(should?) write an alternative OS to
Windows: NirOS

------
huxflux
I love Nirsoft, came back for their tools for years!

------
voltagex_
In a similar category, a tool that's gone offline recently is Rohitab's API
Monitor - strace/ltrace for Windows.

------
bradknowles
Only for Windows, right?

Even so, it’s still a pretty cool list. Congratulations to the author!

~~~
Nextgrid
Most other OSes have the functionality of these tools as built-ins. If
anything it’s concerning to see that Windows _still_ doesn’t include features
out of the box.

~~~
da_chicken
First of all, not really. GNU doesn't do everything. It's important to
remember that distros -- BSD or Linux -- are aggregations of software packages
from _many_ different developers, most of whom have no relationship to each
other. Other operating systems including Android, Mac OS, and even iOS use
these same open source tools, too, so they can't really be said to include
these tools as a result of their own development, either.

Second of all, much of the work was still done by Microsoft. The vast majority
of NirSoft's tools just use the existing WinAPI. The functionality was already
there. Indeed, many of these tools are alternative versions of tools which are
already provided by Microsoft.

~~~
stonogo
you managed to write two paragraphs and the only relevant arguments you made
were the words "not really."

you conflate GNU with the concept of a distro, pretend that a distro is
something other than an operating system, and then bizarrely give microsoft
credit for "WinAPI" like other operating systems don't have APIs.

What it boils down to is almost all of these tools are readily available as
vetted and integrated parts of other modern operating systems and on Windows
you get to download this stuff and play with antivirus settings instead.

This reminds me of the advent of Windows XP, when Windows finally shipped with
the ability to do things other operating systems had for years, such as
unzipping files and looking at JPG. Maybe one day, Windows _will_ have this
functionality available to the user out of the box... but that day is not
today.

~~~
da_chicken
> you managed to write two paragraphs and the only relevant arguments you made
> were the words "not really."

That's because that was the argument. You're comparing apples and oranges.

First, _none_ of the NirSoft utilities are core OS features. Those that look
like they might be are just alternate versions of what Microsoft provided.

So your argument isn't a criticism of operating system design. It's a
criticism of software distribution model. You're not saying that Windows _isn
't capable_ of doing these things, you're just saying, "Windows doesn't have a
universal package manager that allows me to easily install them." If Windows
_did_ have a good, universal package manager for free user and system
utilities, these utilities would almost certainly be in that repository.
However, they don't fit well into the design of NuGet (which is developer
focused) or Chocolatey (which is generic, but enterprise focused) or
PowerShell Gallery (which is PowerShell exclusive) or the Windows Store (which
has no traction).

Maybe you're too young to remember when not all distros had package managers
and repositories, but having to find your utilities online, having to download
them and then compile and install them yourself used to be completely normal.
That was standard. It's not an inherently flawed system. The only reason Linux
had to go that way from that model was because of dependency hell. There were
too many pieces moving in too many different directions and too many breaking
changes. In other words, Linux had such a rats nest of incompatible versions
that it _required_ someone to create distributions which included vetted
package management because it was an absurd amount of work to maintain a
system otherwise. That's why even today Linux distros tell their users not to
download and install software that didn't pass through their testing process.

Windows has never had that problem because Microsoft worked very hard not to
break backward compatibility, even between edtions, so it was never considered
necessary. That is, until Apple decided to open their own package manager: the
Apple store. And it made Apple even richer. And the Google Play store does the
same for Google. And now you see why package managers and repositories can
also be bad: they can be walled gardens or revenue farms, neither of which are
necessarily acting for the benefit of the user.

So your argument kind of boils down to, "Microsoft doesn't have a walled
garden!" You're right! It doesn't! That's not a bad thing!

Windows is an OS. That's all. Linux distributions are an OS and an extremely
diverse set of other software components which tells it's users to _only_ use
their vetted software unless you're prepared to deal with dependency hell
again.

