WSCC Portable Edition

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on February 28, 2012

WSCC stands for Windows System Control Center. It's a free console program that integrates access to hundreds of free system utilities supplied by Microsoft and others. WSCC Portable Edition is a totally portable version of WSCC. It saves all its utilities to local folders, so there's nothing to uninstall: simply delete any program you don't want, or delete the whole folder.

WSCC opened with an automatic update finder. The utilities come from three sources: Microsoft Sysinternals, Microsoft Windows, and NirSoft. It listed all available downloads, more than 250 in total, each with a check box selected by default. We merely had to uncheck any tool to skip it, but Select All and Deselect All buttons would help. Some of the tools listed for download we already had in our system, but we downloaded all the listed utilities anyway since they're all small, we have plenty of disk space, and we wanted to be able to access them inside WSCC Portable. The update took a few minutes to download all 250-plus tools. When it finished, WSCC's clean, efficient interface opened. This Explorer-style console has a left-side panel listing all its utilities in a tree view. We could create Favorites and Search for tools from the panel, too. Selecting any category displayed all the available tools from that provider. For example, under Sysinternals, we clicked the first entry, File and Disk. In its main window, WSCC displayed a list of all the tools in that category with brief but clear explanations. We could quickly open tools ranging from AccessChk to Volume ID, with others like Process Monitor, DiskMon, and Sigcheck available as well. The Windows tree offered many familiar system utilities. Under NirSoft, we found many useful tools we've reviewed in the past, including many unique tools.

With more than 250 tools and automatic updates checking for more all the time, WSCC Portable Edition should be your first stop for those system maintenance and configuration tasks. WSCC's entire folder took up just more than 52MB, making the ultimate portable toolkit small enough for any USB drive.