ShortcutPathViewer

Modern applications usually ask to place executable shortcuts on the desktop and various different areas of the PC for easy access. This can cause your PC to become cluttered, and removing programs from the system doesn’t always clean up leftovers. However, you can use ShortcutPathViewer in order to scan shortcuts and check whether targets exist.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package. Apart from the low disk space it takes, there’s no installation involved, and so you can even use it on other computers directly from a thumb drive. The application only reads data from the system and doesn’t make any changes to actual registry entries.

As far as the visual design is concerned, all elements are wrapped around appealing panels, tables, and other details which make accommodation a walk in the park, regardless of your experience with computers. What’s more, scan is automatically performed on launch and it’s already done by the time the main window shows up on screen.

The default target location is the desktop, since it’s the most common place for shortcuts. You’re free to change the location by pasting the path or using the browse dialog. All detected shortcuts with the LNK extensions are shown in a table, as well as the total detected amount, and those which are broken.

Apart from file names, the results table also contains details about target path, whether it exists anymore, start location, as well as the folder in which the shortcut is found because subdirectories are included in search as well.

Sadly, the application can’t help you directly process files so you can easily remove broken links. On the other hand, you can have the shortcut or target locations brought up to take matters into your own hands. Initiating a different scan means you have to run the program again because there’s no refresh button.

Taking everything into consideration, ShortcutPathViewer can help you determine whether all shortcuts on your computer are still valid. Detection and process speed are impressive, but it would have been pretty useful to be able to remove broken shortcuts directly from the main window.