winget install --id=MarkAlexander.WinVitals -e WinVitals checks a Windows PC the way a careful technician would, explains what it finds in plain English, and offers repairs that show their exact commands first, take a verified restore point, and can be undone. It never calls a driver or BIOS out of date without linking the vendor's own page, and never confuses "could not check" with "nothing found".
Diagnose, clean up and speed up a Windows PC — written for people who are not technical.
A check-up and repair tool for a Windows PC.
You tell it what is wrong in plain words — "it won't sleep", "my PC is slow", "the battery doesn't last" — and it checks the right things, explains what it found, and offers to fix it. Every repair shows you exactly what it will do before it does it, and every repair can be undone.
Download WinVitals.exe, run it, accept the prompt. There is nothing to install — one file, no .NET required.
Everything needed to explain a misbehaving Windows PC is already on the machine. It is
just scattered across powercfg, Device Manager, the event log, WMI and a dozen
Settings pages, several of which need administrator rights and none of which talk to
each other.
So when a laptop wakes up in a bag, or fills its second drive on its own, the answer is a forum thread telling you to run four commands and work out what the output means.
WinVitals runs those commands, joins them up, writes down what they mean, and then offers to do something about it.
| Module | What it looks at |
|---|---|
| System & Firmware | Model, BIOS/UEFI version and date, Windows build, uptime, Fast Startup |
| Startup speed | How long the PC takes to boot from Windows' own measurements, how much of that is startup programs, and whether it is getting slower |
| Power & Sleep | Sleep states, what is blocking sleep right now, scheduled wake-ups, devices armed to wake, and whether sleep actually holds |
| Storage | Disk health and SMART, free space, TRIM, and which Windows features are eating the space |
| Battery | Real wear against design capacity, cycle count |
| Memory | Installed memory, slot arrangement, single-channel detection, current pressure, page file |
| Devices & Drivers | Every device Windows has flagged, with the error code translated |
| Startup & Tasks | What launches at sign-in, and which scheduled tasks are allowed to wake the machine |
| Network | Adapters and driver versions, DNS, and which ports are open to the network |
| Security | Antivirus, firewall per profile, BitLocker, shared folders, Remote Desktop |
| Updates & Recovery | Patch level, deferred restarts, and whether a usable restore point exists |
| Crashes & Stability | Blue screens, unexpected shutdowns, hardware errors, repeat app crashes, disk errors |
Twenty-three repairs, each one showing its exact commands before it runs:
A weekly check-up can be switched on from the Home page: a scheduled task runs the full scan every Sunday, keeps the report, and the dashboard shows the score.
These are the reasons to use this rather than a "PC health" tool.
1. It never says something is out of date unless it knows.
WinVitals will not tell you a BIOS or driver is old. It reports the version and date it found and links the vendor's own download page. Offline guesses about what is current are wrong often enough to send people hunting for updates that do not exist, or to "update" a driver to something older and generic. A 2022 driver is frequently the last one the vendor ever shipped.
2. It never confuses "I could not look" with "there is nothing there."
Several checks — what is blocking sleep, disk SMART data, whether you have a restore point — return access-denied to a standard user. A tool that swallows that error reports a clean bill of health for a machine it never examined. Every check that could not run says so, and the summary counts them separately.
3. It takes a restore point, then checks that the restore point exists.
Windows silently refuses to create a restore point if another was made in the last 24 hours: the call returns success and nothing is created. Every script that creates one without verifying afterwards is lying to its user some of the time. WinVitals suspends that throttle, creates the point, counts the restore points again, and tells you plainly if it did not work — before changing anything, not after.
4. Every change is reversible, and the record survives a reboot.
Undo information is captured before a change is applied and written to disk immediately, not held in memory. The cases where somebody needs to undo something are exactly the cases where the machine has been restarted since. The Undo screen lists everything WinVitals has ever changed on the machine, with a button to put each of it back.
Repairs that genuinely cannot be undone — deleting temporary files, emptying the Recycle Bin — are marked as permanent and are never included in the one-click batch.
Reports end up pasted into forum threads and support tickets, so the Save Report button
offers to strip your username, PC name, hardware serial, MAC and IP addresses first. On
the command line that is --redact. It is a best-effort text filter rather than a
guarantee, and the report says so at the bottom.
Running with any argument gives a read-only scan and an HTML report. Repairs are only offered in the interface, where the consequences and the undo can be shown first.
WinVitals.exe open the interface
WinVitals.exe --check sleep scan just the sleep checks, write a report
WinVitals.exe --redact full scan, shareable report
--check Run one symptom check instead of everything
--out Where to write the HTML report (default: Desktop)
--json Also write the findings as JSON
--redact Strip identifying details so the report is safe to share
--only Run only these modules, comma separated
--skip Run everything except these modules
--no-open Do not open the report when finished
--scheduled Write the report to WinVitals' own folder and leave a summary
for the dashboard (what the weekly task runs)
--gui Force the interface
--run Open the interface straight into one check
Checks: full slow sleep battery network crash space security
Modules: system power storage battery memory devices startup network security updates reliability
Exit codes: 0 nothing critical, 1 at least one critical finding, 2 bad arguments,
3 could not write the report.
WinVitals always runs as administrator. Windows asks once when it starts; declining simply does not start it.
It requires elevation because half of what it does is impossible without it: what is holding the machine awake, what is scheduled to wake it, the drive's own failure prediction, BitLocker status, whether any restore point exists — and every repair. A version that ran unelevated would be a worse tool with a banner apologising for itself.
Debug builds are the one exception: they run as whoever launched them, so the interface can be driven by automated tests without a UAC prompt per run. They say so in the corner of the window.
An unsigned build shows "Unknown publisher" on the UAC prompt and a SmartScreen "Windows protected your PC" warning on first run. That is Windows doing its job: nothing vouches for the file. Until releases are signed, click More info → Run anyway, or install through winget, which does not trigger the warning.
Releases are being set up to be signed through SignPath Foundation, which
provides free code-signing certificates to open-source projects. The workflow step is
in place and activates once the project is approved; see docs/signing.md
for how it works and what was submitted. ./build.ps1 -Sign remains available for
signing with a conventional .pfx, and the workflow also carries a dormant Azure
Trusted Signing step.
SmartScreen reputation is separate from the signature and is earned by downloads over time.
Needs the .NET 8 SDK.
git clone https://github.com/mark-alexander-hub/winvitals
cd winvitals
./build.ps1
The single-file executable lands in dist/WinVitals.exe. It is self-contained, so it
runs on a machine with no .NET installed.
dotnet run --project src/WinVitals.App -- --no-elevate --no-open --out report.html
dotnet test tests/WinVitals.Tests
The parser tests are pinned against verbatim powercfg output captured from real
machines, tabs and all. These formats are undocumented and vary by sleep model, so they
are tested against reality rather than against what the documentation implies.
src/WinVitals.Core/ collectors, the report writer, and the repair engine
Collectors/ one file per module
Remediation/ fixes, the undo journal, the restore-point guard
src/WinVitals.App/ the WPF interface and the command line
tests/WinVitals.Tests/ parser and redaction tests
Implement ICollector, add it to the array in AppInfo.cs. Every finding carries four
things, and a pull request that omits any of them will be asked for it:
The evidence requirement is the important one. WinVitals does not ask to be trusted; it shows its working.
Implement IFix, add it to FixCatalog. The contract:
Reversible = false honestly if it cannot be undone; the interface will keep it
out of the one-click batchRisk decides whether it can be bundled or must be confirmed individuallyIssues and pull requests welcome. Especially useful:
--redacted reportMIT. See LICENSE.