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NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

nirsoft.net

51–59 of 59 posts

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#51

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 ha…

They have a section on their Website about the AV issues. https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/

Thanks, I never came across that.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#52

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.

They are almost all simple enough that you can use something like IDA to see quite plainly which APIs they are calling out to.

If you really want to know, this is how you find out.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#54
post #2

NirLauncher is a portable software package containing over 200 of these utilities. https://launcher.nirsoft.net/ And here's the top 10, sorted by downloads https://www.nirsoft.net/top_utilities_downloads.html

WSCC combines Nirsoft and Sysinternals with added search. https://www.kls-soft.com/wscc/

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a section on their Website about the AV issues. https://blog.nirsoft.net/category/antivirus-issues/

Thanks, I never came across that.

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

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#56
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/ [2] - http://mitec.cz/

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#57
post #15

Nir Sofer: 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…

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.

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#58
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...)

Re: NirSoft, a collection of small and useful freeware utilities

#59

This reminds me of, and has me nostalgic about, TinyApps[1]. [1] https://tinyapps.org/

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

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