A portable toolbox for network admins, software developers, and IT road warriors               over 750 free power-tools in an organized structure you can customize, extend, and carry in your pocket !

     These instructions are designed to create a tool folder that is transportable across systems, either via LAN, or USB Flash drive sneaker-net.  IOW, it is designed so that you build your base PMToolindex installation on your local machine, and then you can copy it to a USB flash drive if you like, or to other machines on the LAN or elsewhere, etc.  Your local hard-drive copy is your 'master', and you copy it to your USB flash drive as needed when you update it.  You can then always run it from your local 'base folder', or from the USB stick on other machines.

     The important point here is the pathing, relative vs absolute.  An ABSOLUTE path is something like "C:\Windows\System32".  A RELATIVE path is something like "..\SystemInternals", where the ".." is taken to mean 'Whatever folder PMToolindex is in, on whatever drive, under however many parent folders'.  PMToolindex uses both, automatically.

     Here we go !

1)  Unzip PMToolindex.zip to the default folder 'PMToolindex'.  This can be under whatever parent folders you want, or directly on C:\ as you choose.   Do this on your hard drive for right now, not directly your USB flash drive.  You'll see why in a minute.

   The Acquisition Wizard will create some sub-folders, like Nirsoft, SystemInternals, etc, where you will save the ZIP files you are about to download from some websites.  The reason for doing it this way is to keep master Zips always at hand, so McAfee or other anti-virus programs don't erase the programs on you !  They tend to like to do that without even asking you :-(.  This way, you always have the original ZIP's to re-install from if needed.  Everything I link to can run even under McAfee, etc.  I'll do a web page later here about how to tame McAfee et al without crippling them.

2)  Copy PMToolindex.zip to a  sub-folder for a backup, if you like.

3)  At this point, you are ready to start using the PMToolindex Wizard to download, unzip, index and integrate a lot of things for you, like Windows Control Panel Applets, Windows Management Consoles ( all of which you already have in Windows\System32 ), your own programs and DOS commands with switches, batch files, scripts, etc. These downloads are each individually optional, at your discretion.  PMToolindex does not require any of them.  I recommend all of them.