11–20 of 59 posts
Only for Windows, right? Even so, it’s still a pretty cool list. Congratulations to the author!
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…
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…
Tools are so good malware started bundling it instead of re implementing functionality = virus scanners equal tool presence with malware, lazy.
“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”
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!
Only for Windows, right? Even so, it’s still a pretty cool list. Congratulations to the author!
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.
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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 developme…
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.