If you are looking at these tools and you have no idea what they might be for then they are clearly not for you. Don't install these unless you know what they do and you agree with their respective terms and conditions. This page is as much a useful reminder for me as anything else!
PortQuery - this is a great tool for testing if the machine you are running the utility on can connect to a port or range of ports an a specified server. You download PortQry from Description of the Portqry.exe command-line utility, there is also PortQryUI - User Interface for the PortQry Command Line Port Scanner. In addition New features and functionality in PortQry version 2.0 is a very good read.
PortQuery will give a number of possible results which are documented as follows:
LISTENING - all ok
NOT LISTENING - destination closed the connection
FILTERED - generally means connection dropped, no response received - firewall dropped, or routing issue
See List of TCP and UDP port numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for details of port numbers etc.
I have found it useful testing 139 & 5900 to confirm a server is running for Windows authentication and VNC is up.
RoboCopy - the most reliable way to copy large files on Windows. This is built into Windows 7/Server 2008 and above, however you can download it for Windows XP as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, which does work on Windows XP. If you don't want to run the installer you can use 7-Zip to extract just robocopy.exe if you prefer. For a list of error codes see Return codes that are used by the Robocopy utility in Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and Happy SysAdm: Robocopy error codes which I have found useful.
Doing a backup of a user's data, I found the following worked well:robocopy C:\Users\username\Documents Y:\username *.* /z /e /xjd /xjf, which copies in restartable mode, includes subdirectories and even empty ones and then skips junction files and junction directories.robocopy c:\testing d:\testing /e /zb /copyall /dcopy:t /move - this is useful for moving files from a c drive to a d drive, it copies the whole tree, with permissions, owner etc and preserves directory date/time stamps. Follow this up with icacls d:\testing /grant BUILTIN\Users:(OI)(CI)M /t which makes sure all users have permissions, not strictly necessary but helped in what I was doing.
The official documentation is at robocopy | Microsoft Docs which is easy enough to follow. There is also a good overview available at Robocopy: The Ultimate Guide if you need some help. My suggestion is that you test your copying with unusual files, for example ones with no extension, to make sure it really does work as you expect.
These have to be the most useful collection of tools for Windows, however they are very technical. Whilst originally independent they are now hosted by Microsoft but still available at the usual SysInternals address. I do like all the tools, but here are some highlights.
Process Explorer - this is Task Manager but massively improved
Process Monitor - great tool for seeing what is really going on with your computer, very detailed but good filtering
PS Tools - command lines tools which are very handy
Sysmon - very useful diagnostic tool, logs a number of useful events to the Event Log, see Sysinternals new Sysmon tool looks for intruder traces | ZDNet, however be sure to check HTA-T09-How-to-Go-from-Responding-to-Hunting-with-Sysinternals-Sysmon.pptx - Microsoft PowerPoint Online by Mark Russinovich, working with its config can be tricky, however Mark suggests Sysmon Shell | nosecurecode as well as Updated SysmonView | nosecurecode
PSPing - this is standard ping on steroids but works best when running on the client and server, extra info is available at Troubleshooting networks with PSPing
Autoruns - great tool for working out what starts up automatically when your computer does
TCPView - want to know what ports are in use by which process, great visual tool
The quick way to get all of the SysInternals tools is as follows:net use x: \\http://live.sysinternals.com
xcopy /s x:\ c:\sysinternals
net use x: /d
However, there are newer and easier ways now, firstly SysInternals is available from the Microsoft Store, so just visit Install Sysinternals Suite from the Microsoft Store, alternatively you can use the Windows Package Manager (winget) with winget install sysinternals.
It is also worth reading Using SysInternals Tools Like a Pro as a good introduction but also look on MSDN and Channel 9.
There are three tools that I have used or tried to use that seem good. Firstly there is The Official ImgBurn Website which is a great CD/DVD utility which uses or creates ISO files as well as Audio CDs. Secondly there is UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads which will write an ISO to a USB drive, however it does drop it's own menu on rather than just ISO contents, I need to find a utility more suited to what I want. There is also Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool - Home, however this only works with Windows ISO files and will write them to USB or DVD.
This looks interesting, must try it some time!
IEZoneAnalyzer v3.5 with Zone Map Viewer - Microsoft's USGCB Tech Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
If you want to access a Unix/Linux server via Secure Shell (SSH) then PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client is the defacto, standard tool. However, I have seen ExtraPuTTY | Fork of PuTTY which might be worth a look. See Secure Shell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for information on SSH. See Secure Shell (SSH) for some hints on using PuTTY.
Sometimes you want to produce a checksum of a file to confirm that what you have downloaded is exactly the same as the author publishes. There are various tools for this, but Microsoft have made a File Checksum Validator command line tool, see Availability and description of the File Checksum Integrity Verifier utility which produces MD5 or SHA1 checksums. There is also a PowerShell version at TechNet PowerShell File Checksum Integrity Verifier (PsFCIV).
I have used the ncat part of Nmap: the Network Mapper - Free Security Scanner to open ports on a Windows box to then test firewalls. I downloaded their Windows installer and used 7-Zip to extract ncat.exe, libeay32.dll, ssleay32.dll from the file. You might need to install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable" to get this working. Then I executed ncat -l --keep-open 2112 --recv-only which starts ncat listening on port 2112, see Emulating Diagnostic Services for more details.
There is a nice intro to Nmap over at Beginner-friendly Nmap Tutorial – Linux Academy which is worth looking at.
The Gnome suite of tools is always interesting, I am not going to list them all but just pull out any highlights I find.
In the past I have used WinMerge, which is still a good diff tool and it is native, so performs well. For a number of years it was not maintained, but it is being now. Having tried Meld briefly I can say it works nicely. It does look like a Linux application when you run it on Windows but that is easy enough to work with. It will also compare a directory to a Git repository, picking up the config from the .git directory, which is very nice. I believe it will also do a git commit etc, so almost works as a very basic Git tool. See also Apps/Meld - GNOME Wiki! for details.
I have used NSIS Wiki in the past which is a very capable install solution and has worked very well but Inno Setup is probably also worth a look, it is also available via GitHub.
I have used Acronis tools for a while, specifically Disk Management Software - Acronis Disk Director 12 and The Best Backup Software - Acronis True Image 2017.
Sticking with tools I have used GRC | Hard drive data recovery software is very good.
I have heard good things about a number of tools including CloneZilla and Recuva - Restore deleted files, even if you've emptied the Recycle bin! - Piriform.
Atom is an Open Source text editor, led by GitHub.
This is a Microsoft led, Open Source code editor, see Visual Studio Code for more details.
I have used WinMerge over a number of years and it is a good option, all the better now for being maintained after a period of no updates.
See curl for more details.
If you want to download this for Windows, then I would suggest the same source as for curl, so visit vszakats/curl-for-win: Reproducible curl/libcurl (and OpenSSL) binaries for Windows and download it from there.