Portable SpyMe Tools

This is the portable counterpart of SpyMe Tools, a powerful and simple-to-use application whose goal is to monitor changes made to the registry and disk in real time. It can also scan their current status to compare it with a previously taken snapshot.

This software utility may come in handy if you're trying to figure out the exact registry items and files created by other programs at installation, for example.

Since there is no setup pack involved, you can save the app directory to any part of the hard disk and immediately launch SpyMe Tools. This also means that you can move the program to a USB flash disk or other removable storage unit, in order to run it on any PC effortlessly, without previously installing anything.

What's more, unlike most installers, this portable app does not create new registry keys of its own, nor extra files on the disk without permission, so no tracks are left behind after its removal.

The UI is not particularly attractive but user-friendly. You can specify the exact registry actions to keep an eye out for when it comes to the real-time monitor (e.g. value deletions, reads, writes), as well as select the exact drives to oversee, specified directories, and actions made to files and folders (create, rename, delete).

You can scan selected drives or registry hives in order to take a snapshot, save it to file (password protection is optional, in case you share the PC with other users), and compare with a second snapshot that you can create at a later time. Worth mentioning is that the app cannot monitor both registry and drives at the same time, so you have to toggle the two modes.

The app does not put a strain on computer performance, since it runs on low CPU and RAM. It allows you to set the thread priority and save log files for later inspection. Scan jobs are carried out pretty fast. No error messages were shown in our tests, and the SpyMe Tools did not hang or crash.

On the other hand, it failed to display scan results on later operating systems in our evaluation. We must also take into account the fact that SpyMe Tools has not been updated for a long time, so it's likely to have such compatibility issues.