Windows: If you want a solid overview of what computers, networked printers, and other resources are available on your network, NetResView is a free, light weight, and portable application for doing so.

NetResView is a stand-alone application capable of scanning your network and showing you all computers, printers, shared folders, and other network resources available on domains and workgroups your computer is connected to. From the NetResView interface you can see the resource name, type, what workgroup or domain it belongs to, its IP address, a local path if it's on the machine you're working on, the MAC address of the machine, and other information.

You can restrict the scope of the search by excluding information like the individual shares on each machine—noticeable increase in speed—or restricting the search to only a certain domain or workgroup if you're on a particularly large network and a portion of the network is irrelevant to your search needs. The information generated by NetResView can be saved as an HTML report. NetResView is freeware, portable, and Windows only.

Windows only: Portable application NirLauncher bundles 100+ of the best NirSoft utilities into a single launcher window, and even allows you to add your own utilities to make a killer flash drive toolkit.

Once you've downloaded the zip file, you can extract the contents into a new folder on your desktop or flash drive, and then launch the NirLauncher.exe application from that folder, which will give you quick access to the 100+ NirSoft utilities included in the package.

It's important to note that because of the system-tweaking, hacking nature of the NirSoft utilities, they sometimes come through as a false positive on your anti-malware utility—but that doesn't mean that they are infected with a virus. Depending on the type of system protection that you have installed, you might have to remove the files from the quarantine folder in order to use all of the utilities.

Tweaking the Launcher

You can edit the included NirSoft.nlp file in a text editor to add or remove the utilities that you prefer—or you can even create a new .NLP file with your own customized settings. Just make sure to use relative paths to the executable files to make sure that they will be portable when you put it onto your flash drive.

The NirSoft blog even provides a launcher file for the suite of awesome, portable, system-tweaking tools from SysInternals—simply download the launcher file and extract all of the SysInternals applications into a folder, and then use the Launcher -> Add Software Package menu to add the entire group into the application. Once you've got them there, you can switch between the NirSoft and SysInternals groups with the F3 key, or through the Launcher menu.

NirLauncher is a free download for Windows only. What applications would you include in your own portable flash drive toolkit? Tell us in the comments. Thanks, Scott!

Windows only: TextDiff is a simple and portable tool for quickly comparing and merging changes in documents and files.

Plug in a pair of documents and TextDiff will quickly highlight all the differences by line and by the portion of the line which has changed. You can ignore spaces and special characters, edit the text from within TextDiff, and generate reports highlighting the differences. For file comparisons you simply point TextDiff at the two different folders and it will highlight which files share names but otherwise fail to match each other.

For another text comparison tool, check out our guide to WinMerge. TextDiff is freeware, Windows only.