Useful Utilities - NirSoft

Today's useful utilities are called NirSoft. NirSoft is a collection of at least 140 utilities from a guy named Nir Sofer. His utils are small simple tools, each one does a very specific task - but it does that one task very well. You'll probably only find use in a small percentage of his tools useful, but it's like looking for that little golden nugget. Below are some of his tools which I find useful.

IconsExtract and ResourceExtract - These two programs extract icons (and other resources) from EXEs, DLLs, etc. You can extract from a single file, and entire folder, even running processes. If you ever need to copy resources from another file here's the best way to do it.

ProduKey - This program scans your registry and extracts license keys you used to install software. Want to know the license key used to install Windows or Office, this program will get them for you. And no, they are not stored in plain text in the registry, they're encoded and this program decodes them.

RegScanner - RegScanner is a very powerful registry scanning tool. It provides a lot of scanning options not available in regedit, like scanning for keys created in a specific date range, or keys of a certain size. For example, you can scan your system for keys larger than 100K in size. Yes, you will have them - you'll probably find several keys as large as half a meg for a single registry value.

USBDeview - This program shows you all USB devices connected to your system, or ever connected to your system. Over the years if you've connected 20 flash drives to your computer, every one of those flash drives will have an entry. This allows you to see and even delete those entries.

WirelessNetView - This nifty little program shows you all wireless networks currently detected, info about the network such as security type, and most importantly it shows you real time signal strength in percentage. I hate Windows vague "good," "excellent," "poor" rating - it's so much nicer to see something like 73% signal strength. This allows you to fine tune the position of your wireless router.

I hope you'll take the time to browse NirSoft. There's a lot of gems in here!