Windows diagnostics

Canary

A second opinion for your PC. It reads the counters vendors skip — and when it can't check something, it says so instead of calling it healthy.

Download free135 KB · Windows 10/11 · nothing installed

Same drive · same afternoon

Samsung Magician

Good

Drive Health

Canary

252 unrecoverable errors
23% spare blocks gone
…at 0% wear

Not scanned
Nothing found
Worth a look
Needs attention

The bird doesn't change colour because you picked a favourite. It changes because it found something.

What it does

Hardware,
or software?

It scans for real faults — failing drives, crash patterns, driver problems — and turns Event Viewer codes into plain English. It tunes settings too. That's the smaller half.

The answer decides whether you spend money.

Critical252 unrecoverable media errorsReads the drive couldn't recover, even with its own error correction.
Warning7 unexpected shutdowns — none in 20 daysDowngraded because it stopped happening, and it tells you that’s why.
WarningDrive health couldn't be verifiedWindows refused the query. That’s a gap — not a pass.
HealthyFolders stored locallyNothing silently syncing to OneDrive.
The part that matters

What it won't do.

“PC optimizer” has a deserved reputation. Here's what's missing on purpose — so you can judge any tool that offers it. Including this one.

Clean your registry

It's an indexed database. Unused keys cost nothing. Microsoft doesn't endorse cleaners, and deleting a live key breaks things weeks later.

"Free up" your RAM

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Windows caches on purpose. Emptying it makes the next few minutes slower, not faster.

Disable services in bulk

Most sit idle using no CPU. The ones that matter — Update, Defender, audio — break in ways you'll never trace back.

Promise "30% faster"

A number with no methodology is marketing. Be sceptical of any figure a tool won't show its working for.

Instead: every change says what it does and why, records the old value, and writes an undo script. If a change can't be explained in one sentence, it shouldn't ship — and you shouldn't trust a tool that won't explain it.

Why you

Tested on
exactly one PC.

Mine. An i9-13900K with an RX 7900 XTX — representative of nothing. Every check was written against one machine's quirks. No idea what it does on AMD, a laptop, or a clean install.

It caught a real failing SSD — and threw two false alarms I only spotted because I knew the answer. That's what other machines will shake out.

What helps most

  • 1Tell me if a finding is wrong — a warning about something you know is fine is the best bug report there is.
  • 2Tell me if a finding is confusing. If you can't tell what to do, that's my fault.
  • 3Anything that crashes or looks broken — especially on a laptop or AMD.
DownloadMessage me on Discord
Setup

Sixty seconds. Nothing installed.

  1. 01Download and unzip. Right-click the ZIP → Properties → Unblock first.
  2. 02Double-click Run Canary.bat, accept the admin prompt.
  3. 03Hit Run Scan Only — the outlined button under Optimize.
  4. 04Read the Health tab. Tell me what looks wrong.

It's a PowerShell script — nothing added to your system, nothing to uninstall. Admin is needed to read drive health. Scanning changes nothing.

Fair warning

What it can't tell you.

There's a check for signs of a compromised PC. It can raise suspicion. It cannot tell you a machine is clean — everything it does runs as an ordinary program, and anything at kernel level hides from all of it.

Same rule throughout: a check that couldn't run says “couldn't verify”, never “passed”.

Every number measured on a real machine. Not estimated.