Small But Powerful: 30 Useful Apps Under 2MB



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I admire your time and effort. Thank for sharing post.



I use CPU Z everyday and I am very satisfied!


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CPU Z is a great tool for managing your multi core systems. In particular if you are setting up dedicated cores for rendering etc. To be honest all of these tools are must haves for all of us productivity geeks out there. Even though people are now using huge hard drives and high power processors the need for small footprint yet powerful utilities is always there, It just means you can use more of them :)  cannabis seed



To keep it honest, CCleaner is just over 3.5MB.

μTorrent has one major drawback. It doesn't support broken downloads. That was the reason, why I switched to Free Download Mnager. Installation package about 6.5MB, 18.6MB fully installed. It has built-in Torrent support and many useful features, like scheduling downloads, shutting down a computer afterwords, etc. To work with latest versions of FF, one needs to download and configure the FlashGot add-on.

CpuZ while small, has very limited capabilities. Speccy from Piriform gives one a lot of info about different components, not just CPU. Installation package 3.4MB, 4.3MB fully installed.



How about finding a small app that will allow sending and receiving a pop up message on a computer from another one on the same network?



Gmail notifier plus is in the screen shot, but the link is just vanilla gmail notifier (which is less appealing and has less options) 

Download link for Gmail notifier Plus here ---->



I use many of them already.

When I first bought my Eee PC I knew I had to find smaller programs to do many of the tasks I was doing on my Home PC. The 8GB hard Drive ment I had to eliminate bloatwear, and find small programs.

I and others compiled this list:

Winpatrol ToGo 586, DSClock2.2 1311, Eizo-test9  988, SumatraPDF  , Cool PDF  651, JustZipIt  377
WinMd5Sum  181, Sandboxie  455,  (File Hippo) Update Checker 243, MOK (Mouse Only Keyboard) 68
Calc Plus 476,  convert  153

Many of the tools here are in MaxPC's previous article:,4

Your size limit should be like mine 1.4mb The maximum you could get on a single 3.5" floppy disk.

I'll try more of these, Good work!




"Everything" is great; it did my C: in a jiffy. BUT I can't make it work with my Win Home Server. I am trying to index everything in my WHS but I don't seem to get the parameters right.
Can someone help? I will certainly appreciate it. Thanks.



@Sparx10 TeraCopy is a lot faster for me, and way more useful than windows' copy function.


My favorite under 2MB is by far uTorrent.



SpaceSniffer is so much nicer than WinDirStat in my opinion, faster and more helpful. I love it.

Everything search engine is also quite amazing, so fast. I only wish there was a way to replace Windows search with it. You can replace Windows Search with Google Desktop, I'm sure theres a way to do it for Everything... If anyone finds out, please tell me.

I've been using CCleaner since probably 2006/2007. Best freeware program I've ever used.

uTorrent of course is a favorite :D I could never understand why BitTorrent was like 10MB when uTorrent was 200kb and had more features than BitTorrent does.

7zip is great, I recently downloaded an item customizer for it, it's much nicer to use now.

I think ColorCop is a pretty nice program, I'd been using Pixie by Nattyware since then. I think I like Pixie better.

Hamachi is great, many uses all around.

I recently used Memtest86 and found out one of my 2GB modules was not fried, it was only the other one. So thanks to it I have 6GB of memory :D

I haven't had a chance to try Greenshot yet, but it sounds great.

I never got f.lux to work, maybe thats because I was using it in a VM though.

Edit: The VM was causing it not to work. I tried f.lux just now... Worst program I've ever used. It took my screen from a nice white to a disgusting pink/orange. That color ended up hurting my eyes more than the bright white did.

TeraCopy looks promising but I heard it's slower than Windows Explorer's copying function in a lot of cases. I'm quite wary of trying it until there is further evidence.


Just my opinons anyway :D



Glad read some of these were really usefull.



hmmm you put up CPUz but not it's companion GPUz and there's nothing wrong with Win7's sniping tool  for screenies why have two programs that do the same thing



I guess i'm the only one who still thinks that PrtScn + MS Paint is still good enough for any screenshots I need to take.  We have so many people at work that "need" Snagit, I despise that program.  But that's because at my last job the geniuses at software distribution decided to push out Snagit to nearly all the machines on the network.  Many of these machines had Acrobat Pro....and Snagit broke every single copy of Acrobat.  I spent weeks cleaning that mess up.



The hash calculator is nice, but for convenience my vote goes to Hashtab at around 1.2MB.

You just select any file, right-click and select properties, and there is a tab with the hashes (that you select) calculated for you. Drag any file onto the tab and it get compared automatically.



Haven't used Greenshot, but am a big fan of MWSnap for taking screenshots.  Free too and only 644kb. :)

I have heard of and tried a number of the apps, but plan to try a few more of them out this weekend.  Thanks for the list!






Who the heck picked spacesniffer over windirstat?  the latter even clocks in at 1.46MB.



You're absolutely right. Who the... picked spacesniffer over windirstat?



In the section "ShellMenuView and ShellExView", the last sentence says to see the how-to article "here". But there is no link "there".




Whenever Everything starts on system startup, or when I use the right-click search everything option, I get the windows 7 "do you want to allow the following program to make changes to your computer." Is there a way to permanently disable this for this program?



Turn off UAC? Most useless thing M$ ever invented.



hi, Everything and CPUz are both cool, small size indeeds doesn't mean the feature is weak




Under 2MB!!!!  Awesome cuz i have only 1.41GB of 500GB left.   Lets find all that clutter!!!




(Latest version is 1.10, released September 27th, 2001)





I use some of those progies too, here is a couple that I use everyday. ShirusuPad 569 KB Hash tab 1.1meg Locate32 (32&64bit) 1.3meg



thank god your links HERE worked



Solid list, actually have twelve of these installed already.



I think you should add Shell Tools to the list. Far more useful than some of these.

I LOVE the context menu "Show Hidden Files" option. Unfortuately, it's 32-bit only. Does someone know of an alternative program for 64-bit? You can use 32-bit explorer to still use this.





That f.lux is a biiiig difference already. much less strain on my eyes. Call it a psychological thing if you want, but its much better. and it adapts to the time



Great list. I use about 1/2 of these already, and the other half I just have no use for. But I'd like to add a few of my own to the list (all under 2 MB and free):

ShellFolderFix: great utility for managing Windows 7 windows now that Microsoft saw fit to remove previous window size and locations.

Wizmouse: allows you to scroll in windows without having to click on them first.

ATI Tray Tools: allows futzing around with all sorts of under-the-hood settings on your ATI/AMD card.

Sandboxie: great sandboxing tool for all those "might be a virus" programs.

AutoHotkey: the ultimate macro and hotkey utility.



The new version of CPU-Z is around 3.59MB on  Still not horrible, but definitely not under 2MB.  Just thought I'd give the heads up.



Nice uTorrent screen shot. I see your still using uT 1.6, and that you have a decent taste in movies.

Also, Hamachi2 is a peice of crap. LogMeIn did to Hamachi what Ford did to its cars. Build a simple, clean application then down the road triple the size and make it disgutsing. The original Hamachi is by far, much better. Here is the link the previous version.



Yeah, I'll bet the MPAA will be interested in seeing the uTorrent screen cap. Couldn't you have torrented some linux distros for the image?



Guys I doubt it's even their image. It's most likely just an image from a google search for "uTorrent". Obviously MaximumPC would be using the latest version and not doing anything illegal ;)


Insula Gilliganis

Haven't used most of the apps listed and will check out many of them, but I have been using CCleaner for years now.  I run it at boot it so it is one of a very few programs that gets used every day.  It seems to get updated approx. every 2 weeks or so and you can set it up to automatically alert you to newer versions.  2 neat things I use it for is to clean out Adobe Flash "super cookies" that many sites leave behind on computers (on my computer found at C:\Users\"your computer name"\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\\support\flashplayer\sys) and doesn't normally get deleted by browsers.  And I also use CCleaner's "System Restore Remover" to delete all but the 2 or 3 of the most current Windows System Restore files as those can take up a lot of hard disk space needlessly.

This program does so much more than any brief description can give it justice and should be installed on every computer.



amen my bratha!       I couldn't agree more.         Thx for the list MPC!    IrfanView is another one that's a must install for me.      Then again, image editors are .10 a dozen these days.   ;)



that's a nice lookin' .minecraft folder you got yourself there. 

just a quick 'get-to-know-you', do you use custom texture packs?



Thanks. HashCalc is what I've been looking for.

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