10 Portable Utilities Every IT Pro Should Carry on a USB Stick

The office-visit toolkit changes very slowly. A file manager. A hex viewer. A hashing tool. A boot-time diagnostic launcher. Most of the utilities on a working IT stick have been on that stick, in some form, for a decade.

This list is our current selection. Each app on it runs from a USB drive without installing, leaves no user-hive footprint on the host, and does exactly one thing well. Names first, notes underneath — the download links are on each publisher's own page.

The point of a portable kit is that it works when nothing else does. If a laptop cannot reach the network, we want the diagnostic to run anyway. If the host disk is failing, we do not want to write to it. Every tool below respects those two constraints, and most of them have for years.

We update the list roughly quarterly. If a tool ships a version that starts phoning home or bundling a partner installer, it comes off — usually with a short note in the changelog on this site explaining why.