ShortcutsMan

ShortcutsMan creates a list with all shortcuts you have on your desktop, Start Menu or Start Screen, and any other part of the hard drive, revealing a lot of information about them, including any broken shortcuts which require your attention.

This is a small-sized and portable application that contains many practical features. For example, it highlights all invalid shortcuts and lets you make a smart selection for all highlighted entries to fix the issues.

You can drop the program files in any part of the HDD or on a USB flash drive to directly run ShortcutsMan on any computer without any other installations. More importantly, it doesn't modify Windows registry settings, unlike a lot of utilities after setup.

It's wrapped in a clean and intuitive interface. Shortcuts are automatically scanned and added to the main application window in a list right after launch, and you can review a lot of valuable details.

For instance, you can find out the full path of the file that the shortcut is linked to, whether or not the shortcut is broken, any existing command-line arguments, starting location, assigned hotkey for opening the file (if any), comment, date of last modification, and the icon's full path.

Any columns can be hidden from the list, in case you don't need a particular piece of information. Plus, you can select one, more or all entries from the list, copy all their displayed details to the Clipboard, compile an HTML report, or export data to plain text or XML format.

After instructing the program to select all highlighted (broken) shortcuts, you can attempt to resolve them, which means that the shortcuts will be redirected to their corresponding files if they were moved to another folder or if the file names were modified. Otherwise, the shortcuts can be deleted to get rid of clutter.

It worked smoothly in our tests, without triggering the OS to hang, crash or prompt error dialogs. It had minimal impact on computer performance, and quickly resolved and deleted shortcuts.

To conclude, ShortcutsMan proves to be a reliable cleanup tool for resolving invalid shortcuts or for removing them to declutter the hard drive. It's speedy, effective and easy to use. Plus, it's free and portable.