A toolset for IT Specialists
By: Ski N
Tags: Utilities, Windowstools, Productivity, Tools, Software

A toolset for IT Specialists

A powerful laptop is like a toolbox for the IT specialist. What’s even more important is how efficient and pleasant you work on it. Here it’s all about the tools inside the box.

The 10 tools I install on every fresh laptop

Most laptops come with Windows 10 pre-installed. Out of the box it comes with some lightweight tools like notepad and explorer.

For the heavyweight users this is of course not enough. Luckily Microsoft nowadays offers the Sysinternal suite and PowerToys. Still, there are a number of other powerful tools I install immediately when my new laptop arrives.

These tools proved to be invaluable over the years and I couldn’t imagine my working day without it. The following list contains 10 tools I have default on my laptop. All are free to download and use.

Notepad++

The Notepad++ website states:

Notepad++ is trying to reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions. When using less CPU power, the PC can throttle down and reduce power consumption, resulting in a greener environment.

On the above statement alone, you already know notepad++ is good software. The main developer Don Ho succeeds in the balancing act between functionality and a lightweight editor. It starts fast, there are almost no delays when editing (unlike most IDE’s…).

Personally, I still prefer an IDE for writing applications, for anything else Notepad++.

Double Commander

There are a lot of alternatives to Notepad++ like Sublime or UltraEdit, but to Windows Explorer there are even more alternatives. Best known is Total Commander.

I use Total Commander, but for day-to-day I find it to keyboard oriented. That’s why I use Double Commander. It’s compatible with Total Commanders plugins. For the rest it has all the basics like a dual-pane interface, tabbed browsing and file renaming.

One of the good things about DC is that the startup time is reasonable. A dealbreaker with a lot of other file managers. Though already 12 years in the making, it still has not reached 1.0. This release is planned for later this year.

AgentRansack

One of the annoying things of explorer, but also a lot of other search tools, is that you can’t search properly on file content. Mostly that’s exactly what I want to do. Find files by name, file extension or file content is exactly what Agent Ransack does.

I tried some other tools, because I wanted to use a complete free tool (they also provide an extended paid version), but in the end I had to give in. Noting can’t beat the ease of use and speed of Agent Ransack, but the alternative Everything is coming closer and closer.

WinDirStat

One app I would have expected to be build-in Windows is WinDirStat. This tool analyzes disk space and shows the size of directories presented in colorful treemap.

After analysis, you have at one glance the biggest files/directories on your disk. Of course, you need to know what to do next as you can’t just throw every file away. But sometimes it’s as easy task as deleting a few big installation or ISO files.

Though all basic functionality like scanning and displaying disk are there, the tool isn’t being developed anymore. On Github there is now an alternative AltWinDirStat which still gets updates.

MRemoteNG

Traditionally to get to a server by SSH I used PuTTY. But as it doesn’t support tabs there are many wrappers developed like SuperPuTTY, PuTTYTabManager and mRemoteNG.

I use MRemoteNG not just because of the PuTTY/Tabs support, but because it goes way beyond this. You can manage all your connections and passwords with one tool for all kinds of protocols like SSH, ICA, VNC and RDP.

Virtualbox

With VirtualBox, you can run guest operating systems on your laptop. VirtualBox has the advantage over others because it is easy to use with a GUI. And just as important it’s free, open source and well maintained. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect for all combinations, but most works well enough for daily use.

One use case is to keep customer environments separate as they all use different VPN’s. Another use case is to try various Linux distros. One annoying thing on Windows is that it doesn’t get alone with Hyper-V, but mostly VBox is a fine companion.

DBeaver

In almost every IT job one has to do something with databases. DBeaver is a client which rule them all and supports SQLServer, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and also lesser known databases. It’s a desktop application written in Java and based on the Eclipse platform.

It’s very active developed, so it’s rare when you find a missing feature. Out of the box it provides an SQL editor with code completing and syntax highlighting. The standard version supports SQL databases and there is also an enterprise version that supports various Non-SQL databases.

Draw.io

With Microsoft Office you can use MS Visio which is a nice tool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with Office365, so a lot of people don’t have it installed. A free tool that can be used online as well as a desktop application is Draw.io.

I find Draw.io not always easy to use, but it’s versatile and support many diagrams (currently 145). The good things is that it also supports a lot of diagrams for IT specialists. Whether it’s drawing a GUI, a network or a Class diagram.

WinSCP

WinSCP is a longtime veteran in my toolbox. It’s developed since 2000 by Martin Přikryl. A tool where you can really rely on. When an SFTP connection works in WinSCP the connection works.

The fine thing is that you can do all common operations on files, even though they are on a remote computer. It’s very easy to transfer files between one or another.

Postman

Current day IT is less about file transfer and more about API’s. But just as we needed to manage files, API’s need to be managed and tested as well. Postman is a GUI tool to create request to webservices (mostly REST, but SOAP as well) as it supports all HTTP methods and different ways to make a request.

One of its strengths is the support for all kind of security mechanisms like OAuth. There are so many security standards that good support for all these standards is a must. Insomnia is another API tool that supports this and works in my opinion equally well.

Final note

All mentioned tools make things that are otherwise hard to do, relatively simple. What the common denominator is that they are actively developed and extended while still are fast and easy to use. If you have another top 10 please share below.