very IT tech I know has the same ritual. New machine lands on the bench, or you're at a client site, and before you can actually fix anything you spend twenty minutes assembling the same handful of tools. Download this. Extract that. Oh, this one wants .NET. Oh, this box has no internet. Oh, the client's policy blocks installs.
I did that dance for years. Then I got tired of it and built a portable kit that lives on one USB stick and installs nothing. This post is mostly about what belongs on that stick — because whether you build your own or grab a packaged one, the thinking is the same, and I wish someone had just laid it out for me years ago.
Why "no install" is the whole game
The constraint that shapes everything is this: the machine you're diagnosing is often the machine you can't install software on.
Locked-down corporate profiles block installers.
