There’s a corner of the toolbox that never seems to make it to the cloud: the USB stick you grab when a network is misbehaving. An XDA writer’s recent kit list is a good excuse to build one of your own — four small, mostly-portable tools that together cover most day-to-day troubleshooting on a home or small-office network.
Wireshark Portable is the heavyweight of the four. It captures and dissects packets as they fly, which sounds arcane until the day you need it: the smart TV that phones home constantly, the app that saturates the uplink, the device talking to something it shouldn’t be. The portable build runs straight off the stick with no install, which matters when you’re working on a machine you don’t administer.
Nmap answers the question every network owner eventually asks: “what is actually on my network?” A quick scan lists every live device, its IP, and the ports it has open. It’s how you find the forgotten IoT plug, confirm the new server is reachable, or spot a service listening that shouldn’t be. Its bundled netcat can even shuffle a file between two machines when nothing else will. Nmap runs on everything — Windows, macOS, Linux — and it belongs on the stick in whatever flavour matches the machines you touch.
DNS Jumper is the niche one, and Windows-only, but handy for a specific job: flipping a machine between DNS servers (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, your own) to test whether “the internet is slow” is really “DNS is slow”. On Linux the same experiment is a resolvectl command, but for family and client Windows machines, one click beats editing adapter settings by hand.
NetResView is an old NirSoft utility that still earns its slot: it enumerates everything visible on the local network — shares, printers, other machines — in one flat list. It’s the fastest way to answer “why can’t this PC see the printer” without walking the Network neighbourhood of every desktop involved. Being ancient, run it from the stick and expect the odd quirk on modern Windows; for a ten-second inventory it’s still worth it.
The bigger lesson is the USB stick itself. Everyone has a drawer of orphaned 8GB drives, and a labelled toolkit stick is one of the best second lives they can have: portable apps, a couple of bootable installers, config templates, and the network kit above. When something breaks at 9pm on a Sunday, “plug in the stick” beats “download six installers on the machine that’s misbehaving” every time — and unlike cloud tools, it works when the network is the problem.
