LookInMyPC is a small, portable and freeware tool designed to generate a very comprehensive report of a system and export it to a HTML page. It will display Running Processes, Installed Devices, Drivers, Services, Startup Programs, Windows Updates, TCP/IP Port Usage, Registry Run Entries, System Restore Information, Event Log detail and much much more.

Here is a sample of a report that LookInMyPC produces:
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage1.htm
http://www.lookinmypc.com/ReportPage2.htm

This application has a nice feature where you can compare previous reports to the current one so you can easily see what changed between then and now.
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I have many clients who have placed passwords on their Outlook PST files to prevent family members or employees from accessing their emails. However, if they ever forget that password they have a problem – this is where PstPassword comes in.

PstPassword is a small, freeware and portable application designed to recover the password from a locked .PST file. The password encryption in Outlook is very weak and for each password protected PST file there will be 3 different passwords that could open it. One of them may be the original password that the client entered, or all 3 might be different to the original.
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Piriform Speccy is a small, portable and freeware utility from the people who brought us CCleaner. Speccy is designed to scan and display a computers specifications. While there is plenty of software out there that can scan and display a computers specifications such as System Information for Windows, SIW can be a little overkill with the amount of information that is shown.

Speccy will just show the important information without all the extra fluff. One Technibble forum member described Speccy as “Portable. Simplistic. Nice GUI. Informative. Straight to the point” which sums it up nicely.
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BlueScreenView is a small, freeware and portable application that scans all of the minidump files that are created when Windows experiences a “Blue Screen of Death”. It will display the information about all the crashes in one table with the minidump filename, the time and date of the crash, basic information about the crash (as in the BSOD message) and the driver or module that possibly caused the crash.

The main benefit of using BlueScreenView over other minidump reading applications is that it does not require the Microsoft debugging tools (which are 16 – 225mb in itself) which makes this application small, quick and portable. This tool is definitely worth having in your kit to track down the cause of BSOD’s.
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After you do a clean install of Windows, you go to the Device Manager and discover the dreaded question mark next to an “Unknown Device”. You could just download the driver for this device, but you don’t know what it is! This is where PCIDatabase.com comes in handy.
PCIDatabase.com is website to help you identify unknown PCI devices without using any special software.
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I have decided to release a side project I have been working on. It is designed to identify what version of Windows a computer is running, identify what version of Windows exists on a CD and identify the version based on the license sticker.

For example, its easy to tell that a computer is Windows XP Professional, but its hard to tell whether the version is OEM, Retail, Corporate, Volume License or something else without the license sticker (all but OEM don’t actually put the sticker on the case).

This tool also has the ability to detect whether the currently installed version is known to Microsoft as a pirate version (nothing to do with WGA). Basically, it’ll let you know before hand whether Windows SP2 or SP3 will install as those two service packs check the product ID with Microsoft before installing.

It does detect the Vista and Win 7 version (which is less useful since they are all on one disk) but the main intention for this is to make identifying Windows XP easier. This should work on most modern mobile browsers so you can use it while onsite as well.
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Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is a freeware utility that allows you to change or blank the password of any user that has a valid account on a local NT/2000/XP/2003/Server 2008/Vista 32 & 64bit system. You do not need to know the old password to set a new one which makes this ideal for use with clients who have forgotten their password or were locked out by someone else. Unlocking locked or disabled accounts is also supported.

This tool comes in the form as a bootable CD ISO or Floppy disk ISO but can also be made to boot from a USB drive. The application is Linux based and it asks you questions about which drive and Windows install you would like to work with. Most questions can be answered just by pressing Enter since the best option is already chosen.

Warning: If used on user accounts that make use of EFS encrypted files, all encrypted files will become unreadable unless you remember the old password again. This is a serious technician tool and shouldn’t be used by people who don’t know what they are doing.

You should also read our “How to spot stolen hardware and why you should refuse to work on it” article before you place this application into your toolkit. Use this for only good and not evil.
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You format a clients computer, put their files back to the original locations including the email clients database. You fill out their email settings as much as you can but realise you don’t have their email password. You call the client and guess what? They don’t know it either. Time to spend 30 minutes talking to their ISP for a password reset. This is where Mail PassView comes in.

Mail PassView is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reveal the password and other account details which you should run before you format the machine. Mail PassView can get password and account details for the following email clients:

• Outlook Express
• Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
• Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
• Windows Mail
• Windows Live Mail
• IncrediMail
• Eudora
• Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Group Mail Free
• Yahoo! Mail – If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
• Hotmail/MSN mail – If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
• Gmail – If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

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We’ve all had it happen before. We go to delete some file and it cant be deleted because its currently in use. That’s easy enough to fix. All you have to do is fire up some sort of process manager like Process Explorer and kill the process, right?

Well, often the file that’s said to be currently in use isn’t a running .EXE in file so it cant be killed by a process manager. It might be a .DAT, .DLL or a .TMP file and its hard to tell whats running it.

This is where OpenedFilesView comes in. Its a freeware, portable application that shows you all the currently open files and what process opened them. The application also allows you to kill any of the currently open files listed so you can delete or move it.

This is definitely a handy tool to have when removing viruses that are running .DLL’s’s that are difficult to delete.
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When a system crashes, it usually leaves behind something called a “crash dump”. This crash dump contains information about what happened. However, in order to read it on a system you need to download and install Microsofts debugging tools, its dependancies called “symbols” and run some commands. WhoCrashed is designed to read the crash dump files with a single click. Just open it, press “Analyze” and it will tell you what driver/hardware caused the problem.
While it wont tell you exactly what happened, it lists a hardware error message or a driver file that failed which you can Google and find the cause.
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