System Explorer Portable for Windows

System Explorer is a free, portable application that scans your system and displays a large amount of useful information in an easy-to-navigate tree view. It also gives you access to online resources that can help you diagnose problems, such as a searchable File Database that includes user-contributed reviews, a forum, and tech support. Since it's totally portable, it can be run from a wide range of devices on any Windows system. It even handles plugins.

System Explorer's scan includes a security check, which identified no vulnerabilities in our system. Hovering the cursor over the program's system tray icon called up a compact dialog displaying CPU, RAM, swap file, and battery usage in bar graphs, an interesting and welcome touch. Clicking the icon brought up the main view, an expandable tree view of running processes, network connections, drivers, startup items, and much more, with options to show only services or Microsoft system entries. We could trigger a system security check any time from the toolbar, or learn more about any entry by clicking the Reviews link (though not all entries have online reviews). The main view's draggable headings include CPU, PID, memory usage, VM size, and more; right-clicking the header bar let us add many others. The main view doesn't hint at what this versatile software packs on its system tray icon's program menu: A Windows auto-run Task engine; a System menu that accesses tasks, processes, modules, drivers, and much more; an Explorer menu accessing protocols and shell extensions; a menu that accesses your various System Utilities; and some interesting Tools, such as a system Snapshot utility, a WMI Browser, and a History log tool. There's also a built-in memory cleanup tool. The program's various interfaces can be configured with selectable columns, expandable views, and other options.

System Explorer belongs in every portable toolkit, but it's a great tool to have on the desktop, too. It gives easy, centralized access not only to comprehensive, detailed information about your system but also its various system utilities, processes, services, and consoles, not to mention a variety of useful online resources.