Download These Handy Tools NOW! Essential USB Tools

like me many of you probably carry around a USB stick that's filled to the brim with your favorite utilities you know just in case but technology changes newer better tools come along and sometimes the older ones aren't as effective or even stop working altogether and realistically who's got the time to keep up with all the latest cool side projects from development with kids who haven't discovered girls yet have no fear because we've got you covered with some improvements to tools you might already know about some awesome utilities that you might not know about and a sneaky solution to a problem that pops up at the worst of times we've also got this completely unexpected segue to our sponsor Samsung Samsung's Galaxy unpacked event is not very far far away and you can reserve the next generation of Galaxy devices all with no deposit or space credits required thank goodness check it out of the link below and get a 50 credit you probably spend a ton of time at your PC wearing headphones so what if there was something you could do to improve your audio quality regardless of how much you spent on them equalizer APO does exactly that adding powerful graphic and parametric Equalization to your Windows PC you can tweak the EQ curve system wide for for more personalized listening experience or per device to boost key frequencies so you catch those footsteps sneaking up behind you before it's too late it's even customizable with add-ons that can enhance it with power functionality like audio device routing surround virtualization and even recommended EQ curves for some of the most popular headphones by the way if yours were overlooked you can check out Auto EQ dot app a database of even more downloadable EQ curves we're going to have links to every tool we talk about today in the description below the only downside you might have to come back to this video and click that link again if a Windows update messes with the sound subsystem and borks your custom setup now if tweaking frequencies isn't your thing and you just want a way to route your audio so that your stream viewers don't hear your Discord buddies inventing new cuss words then voice meter is the tool for you I can't believe we've never talked about this thing because voicemeeter is amazing it's a virtual audio mixer that comes in threes sizes each giving you more virtual channels and control over more Hardware than the last we installed the middle of the road banana version for our demo of what voicemeeter might look like configured for a two-player streaming session we've got audio coming in from our capture card and our two headset mics then using these various A and B buttons on each input Channel we can control where that input audio goes the a outputs are hardware and we've set those up to be each of our headphones and the system speakers and the B outputs are virtual so we've got those routing to Discord and to OBS for streaming once it's all set up both players can hear themselves the game and the Discord audio and the stream viewers hear only the player mics and the game audio oh side note by the way voicemeeter also happens to be just about the best and fastest way to clone your audio output to multiple devices I had a bug a while back where my VR audio mirroring wasn't working which made it impossible to play one of my kids favorite party games and voice meter took care of this for me in about three minutes let's get away from audio for a bit though I'd wager that most of you are familiar with 98 which lets you install and update popular software without all the next next Finish Well if you've ever been disappointed with the selection of applications that are available in ninite then chocolaty might be for you chocolaty is a command line package manager for Windows that has more than 10 000 unique packages available if you've ever used apt or yum to manage software on Linux you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about and if you haven't let me demonstrate why you do care about this on our system here we've already got chocolatey installed so we just go to a prompt and type in choco install paint.net and hit enter chocolaty downloads and installs paint.net for us and all we have to do is say yes when it asks if we're sure and we don't even have to do that if we just add a dash y to the end of our Command we can even string together dozens of packages and have our new machine just set itself up while we go out and wash the car and like nine night chocolatey can also be used to keep your installed programs up to date or specifically to not if there's something you don't want to upgrade you can lock in a particular version there are paid plans available that offer some extra features for business use but even in its free community supported form this is a must have tool and the command line is a little too daunting for you you don't need it just make sure the first thing you install is chocolatey gooey and you can manage everything graphically after that here how about I use chocolaty to show you guys another cool tool winterstat has been a staple of technicians USB keys since its first release back in 2003 allowing us to easily identify what is eating up all of that precious hard drive space but these days you might prefer whiztree from antibody software the interface is immediately familiar but unlike Windows stat it's fast like I'm talking seconds instead of minutes and it even handles gotchas like hard link files significantly more accurately furthermore unlike Windows stat wiztree is still in active development and gets bug fixes updates and new features periodically which by the way you can get automatically by creating a scheduled task to run the update command in chocolatey changing gears our next tool is only in the Microsoft store sorry chocolatey users but it might be worth checking out anyway you've probably heard of windows power toys but have you heard of win toys this utility gathers program and service management tools along with frequently used Windows settings tweaks and fixes and puts them all in one place so you don't have to go digging through the various settings apps and control panels trying to figure figure out where the devil Microsoft has moved things this week speaking of losing track of things I'm sure we've all been there looking for that bootable thumb drive that you know you have you know the one with that ISO on it well no more while it's long been possible to have multiple bootable utilities on a single thumbstick our favorite method these days is ventoy cool after a quick installation to your drive all you've got to do is just copy any ISO or any disk image file you want and ventoy will automatically detect it and add it to a menu at boot no more manually updating menus or requiring the installer software to add or update your tools this has already been a Time Saver for me on multiple occasions oh and while you're adding images to your new ventway Drive be sure to include one of the tiny images from netboot.xyz which uses pxe booting to let you launch your choice of more than 80 operating system installers live operating systems and utility images all downloaded on demand over the Internet it can even boot Windows installers though you will need to do a bit of fancy work to host the installer files on a Windows PE environment somewhere on your network if you'd rather someone else do all the heavy lifting and gather your utilities for you kind of like hiron's boot CD back in the day you can check out medicat USB this massive 20 plus gigabyte collection of tools is wrapped up in a customized ventoy menu system and includes a wide selection of bootable tools along with a Windows PE environment with an enormous collection of portable apps now obviously collections like these exist in the uh legally dubious excuse me Zone but the reality is that if you've ever worked at a tech shop you've probably touched one at some point so we would be naive to imagine that everyone is just going to pretend they don't exist so we installed metacat to a 32 gigabyte thumb drive and actually ended up with only a couple gigs free so if you're going to want to add any additional isos or tools you're going to probably want to start with a bigger device we should also note by the way that our antivirus lost its flipped in mind when we first tried to install this collection and classified many of the utilities as hacking tools which feels a little unfair because it is chock full of legitimately useful repair and diagnostic tools and I think we need to look at them through the lens of the good that they can do rather than the harm like a screwdriver from LTT store it could be used as a shiv but it's a lot more useful for brewing and unscrewing things oh yeah while I'm annoyed by the way why is it so hard sometimes to move files between devices we run into this all the time when we're away from the studio and trying to copy scripts from our Windows laptops to the iPhones that we use as teleprompters it wastes a lot of time and never needs to happen again thanks to simple HTTP server from GitHub user the Wawa running this program in a folder will launch as advertised a simple HTTP server that offers up the contents of that folder to the network that means any machine on the network that has a web browser can then navigate to that IP address and download the file they need easy peasy only one thing just remember to turn off the server when you're done because otherwise pretty obvious security issues oh and on that note don't try to run this utility on your company's corporate Network because I'm sure it's going to send it running hopefully we've introduced you to at least a couple of cool new tools that you're already downloading to your thumb drives and if you've got a suggestion for a must-have that we haven't brought up before let us know in the comments down below ideally you could maybe give us one that 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,441,393

Keywords: windows, pc repair, pc tools, windows utilities, software, audio software, equalizer apo, voicemeeter, wintoys, wiztree, ventoy, medicat, netboot.xyz, bootable iso, usb tools

Id: 0EtgwIajVqs

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023