Is MHSW safe?

The dialog reads "Windows protected your PC", with a Run anyway button underneath. Most people read it as "this file is dangerous". It means something else: Windows does not know this file yet.

SmartScreen is a reputation system. Microsoft tracks how many people have downloaded and run a file and how that went. A program downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people has a reputation and passes silently. A tool written by one person, released last week and downloaded fifty times, has no reputation — and gets the blue dialog. It is not the result of an antivirus scan. If Windows had found malicious code in the file it would not behave like this: Defender would block it outright and move it to quarantine, in red, with no "run anyway" on offer.

So the dialog does not say the file is bad. It says Microsoft does not yet have enough information to vouch for it. That is honest information and worth taking seriously — which is exactly why it makes sense to verify the file rather than click the warning away.

Straight out: the applications on this site have no digital signature. Open Properties on a downloaded file and there is no Digital Signatures tab. That is not an oversight — it follows from how code signing certificates are sold.

Code signing (Authenticode) is not something a developer just generates. The certificate is bought from a certificate authority, paid for yearly, and since June 2023 it has to live on a hardware token or in an HSM, which every CA now requires for new code signing certificates. For one person giving tools away, that is a yearly bill for making a single dialog disappear.

And the important part: a signature says nothing about whether a file is safe. It only proves the file came from whoever bought the certificate and has not changed since. Malware is signed too — with stolen certificates, or with ones honestly bought by a shell company. A certificate is a business card, not a verdict.

Once the tools have enough users to justify it, I will buy a certificate and say so here. Until then, instead of a signature I offer you something you can check yourself and that cannot be bought: a checksum and an independent scan.

None of the applications elevates itself. When one asks for administrator rights it is always for a specific value or action, and without them it is only that one value that is missing:

• HWInf needs administrator rights for disk SMART values — power-on hours, wear and temperature. Without them the column reads not reported and the rest of the inventory works as usual.
• EventAnalyzer needs them for the Security log and some disk counters. Without them it skips those and says so in the log. Elevation is requested only when a repair is run, never for reading.
• PrinterAdmin needs them to act on other people's print queues (pause, resume, cancel jobs). Reading the printer list needs nothing.

EventAnalyzer is the only one that can change anything on the machine. That is why it runs nothing without showing you the whole plan and its commands first, and why a restore point is the first step of every plan. Its own page describes it in detail.