Judging from the comments for today's GOTD, HARDiNFO 8 PRO, thought this list might be useful...
HWiNFO is a small free, portable app that does everything HARDiNFO 8 PRO is supposed to do, and more.
neowin[.]net/news/hwinfo-716/
CrystalDiskInfo is likewise small, free, & portable, reporting hard disk / SSD S.M.A.R.T. data, along with firmware, serial number, interface, transfer mode, drive letter(s), standard, features, total host reads, total host writes, rotation rate, power on count, & power on hours.
neowin[.]net/news/crystaldiskinfo-8140/
Again small, free, & portable, HWMonitor shows live data for motherboard & CPU voltages, temperatures depending on motherboard sensors, fan speeds, CPU amp draw per core, CPU utilization by thread, CPU clocks by core, hard disk / SSD temp, space used, activity, read & write speed, plus GPU graphics & memory clocks, plus GPU & memory utilization.
cpuid[.]com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
Afterburner is free, but it has to be installed. It provides lots of graphics overclocking / tweaking tools, & does a fair amount of monitoring, but what I use most is the capability to have the graphics card's fan speed follow a curve you set. Many cards set the fan speeds as low as possible because noise, but IMHO all that excess heat in the case doesn't do anything, including the card, much good.
msi[.]com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards
Back to small, free, & portable, CPU-Z & GPU-Z are monitoring apps that aren't really needed if you run HWiNFO, but if you don't...
techpowerup[.]com/download/cpu-z/
techpowerup[.]com/gpuz/
WizTree is small, free, portable, & fast. It shows you the files on a hard disk partition ranked by file size.
diskanalyzer[.]com/?ref=wiztree
A small, portable, free one trick pony, W11ClassicMenu gets rid of that abomination that's the right-click context menu in Win11.
sordum[.]org/14479/windows-11-classic-context-menu-v1-1/
ThisIsWin11 lets you quickly set up a new [or old] Win11 install, & yes, small, free, & portable.
github[.]com/builtbybel/ThisIsWin11/releases
And last, with too many small utilities to begin to list them all, Sysinternals & Nirsoft. Most of these utilities are highly specialized, but they can be incredibly handy too. Note that the Nirsoft apps have a habit of triggering anti virus software -- some of it is the nature of the various utilities, e.g. grabbing passwords from the registry, and yeah, some bad guys use the software too.
docs.microsoft[.]com/en-us/sysinternals/
nirsoft[.]net/