Task Manager, Regedit and Explorer are fine for basic Windows troubleshooting, but if your system is having real problems – or you’re trying to manually remove a virus, say – then stronger medicine will be …

Microsoft Office has released the Office Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), a portable utility which can check all your installed Office applications, report on any problems, and provide links to possible solutions.
If you’ve ever tried to …

TechPowerUp has released GPU-Z 0.6.9, the latest version of its lightweight graphics card information tool.
This build adds direct support for even more graphics cards, including AMD Radeon HD 8870M, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti …

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is an important Windows framework which is used by many system components, as well as plenty of third-party applications, so if it’s ever damaged then you could experience all kinds of …

If you regularly troubleshoot other people’s PCs then you’ll know that the process usually starts by collecting system information. Which graphics card does it have, for instance? How many network interfaces, which USB controller, what …

It’s a week since we covered Switchblade, an interesting portable troubleshooting toolkit which was a little flawed by its selection of programs. While there were some excellent choices, the package was distinctly short on system …

If you regularly find yourself helping to fix other people’s PC problems then you’ve probably already thought about creating a portable troubleshooting toolkit. And this needn’t take very long. Just copy something like the Sysinternals …

The respected system benchmarking and analysis tool SiSoft Sandra has been updated to the 2013 version bringing not only support for Windows 8 but a raft of other enhancements. Of course, support for the latest version …

Microsoft engineer Aaron Stebner has released a new version of his .NET Framework Setup Verification tool, with preliminary support for Windows 8 and the .NET Framework 4.5.
The program’s interface remains the same as in previous …

Microsoft has released Outlook Configuration Analyzer 2.0, an excellent tool for troubleshooting a host of common Outlook 2007/ 2010 issues.
As before, the program works by scanning your current Outlook setup and looking for known problems …

Whether your PC is slow, unstable, or perhaps infected by malware, checking your system’s kernel mode drivers is often a good place to begin diagnosing your problems. And you don’t have to install any third-party …