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PowerX is a native Windows control center: Task Manager, System Informer, Autoruns, a debloater and a tweak engine, unified into one WinUI 3 app. It treats deep system monitoring, safe configuration, and premium Windows-native design as equally important, and stays useful even if you never remove a single app.

Status: 0.1.20, an early milestone build. Working today on real Windows data: PowerX.Core (telemetry, a declarative tweak engine, debloat / startup / services inventories, cleanup and repair engines, crash insights, a system report, an append-only change history), the powerx CLI, and a WinUI 3 desktop app with live dashboards, one-click profiles, a network view with listening ports, a Security page and a diagnostics runner.

Download

Grab the latest build from the releases page.

Installer	PowerX-Setup-<version>-win-x64.msi. Per-machine install to Program Files, a Start-menu entry and a desktop shortcut, clean uninstall, in-place upgrade.
Portable	PowerX-<version>-portable-win-x64.zip. Unpack and run PowerX.App.exe. Nothing is written outside the folder except a small change history and settings under %LOCALAPPDATA%\PowerX.

Requirements: 64-bit Windows 10 build 19041 or Windows 11. PowerX runs as administrator because it manages system state. It is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows an "unknown publisher" prompt: choose More info, then Run anyway. Each release lists a SHA-256 for every file so you can verify what you downloaded.

What it does

Area
Health check	Scans everything below and lists what's worth doing, most impactful first: pending restart, no active antivirus, firewall holes, disk space and health, broken startup entries, boot slowdown, driver age, battery wear, event-log criticals, recent crashes, unapplied recommended tweaks. Every item just points at the page that fixes it; nothing here changes anything by itself.
Monitor	Real-time CPU (total, per-core, kernel time), memory (physical, commit, pools, cache), GPU (engine and VRAM via PDH, with a real per-adapter breakdown on a multi-GPU machine instead of one blended number), temperatures (ACPI thermal zones plus per-disk sensors; Windows exposes no CPU or GPU sensor without a vendor SDK, so those are left out rather than faked), network throughput and connections, processes (single-syscall enumeration, per-process CPU, I/O, memory, handles, threads, a real tree, and a plain-language "what is this" note), disks (SMART, temperature, endurance).
Configure	A declarative, evidence-backed tweak engine (35 tweaks). Every tweak states what it does, why you might want it, the downside, restart needs, whether it is reversible, and whether it is recommended. Curated profiles (Recommended, Privacy, Potato mode, Gaming, Restore defaults) apply a visible set in one click with a preview diff. No folklore gamer tweaks (why).
Debloat	About ninety curated entries, Store and consumer apps only, no shell components, nothing pre-selected. Each entry states its removal class and how hard it is to reinstall.
Startup & tasks	Every autostart entry in one list with reversible toggles, a flag on entries whose program no longer exists (removable in one click), boot-performance data (last-boot duration, versus your average, per-entry impact from the same source Task Manager uses), a "delay after sign-in" option for a slow entry, and a curated Scheduled Tasks view with a stance on the well-known telemetry and updater tasks.
Drivers & firewall	A driver inventory that flags drivers three or more years old or unsigned (never installs anything), and a read-only firewall-rules view that flags a broad inbound-allow hole.
Event log	Recent Application and System errors grouped by source and id, with a plain-language note for the common ones.
Clean and repair	Size-first disk cleanup with a per-category breakdown, a component-store (WinSxS) analysis with the safe Microsoft cleanup, and a runner for SFC, DISM, chkdsk, network reset and Windows Update repair with streamed output.
Storage explorer	Point it at a drive or folder and it sizes every child recursively, largest first, streaming results in as each folder is measured; click to drill down. Junctions and symlinks are skipped.
What changed	A daily background snapshot of your configuration (startup entries, scheduled tasks, services, programs, drivers, tweaks) with an added / removed / changed diff between any two. Local-only JSON.
Share this setup	Export the tweaks you have applied to a small file, apply them on another PC behind a preview.
Crash insights	Reads what Windows already recorded (WER, event logs, and only on request the metadata inside a crash dump) and separates observed facts from likely cause, with a confidence level. Never downloads symbols, never opens a dump in a debugger, never uploads anything.
Network	Live up and down rate, per-process connections with remote address and state, a listening-ports view that flags what is reachable from the network, opt-in reverse DNS for public addresses, built-in ping / traceroute / DNS, (elevated) which process is using the bandwidth right now, and enabling or disabling an adapter.
Security check	PowerX is not an antivirus. This shows Microsoft Defender's real status and the threats it has caught, starts a Defender scan, and checks a file's SHA-256 against the open CIRCL hash database.
System report	powerx report or a Settings button writes hardware, OS, storage, applied tweaks, recent changes and an event-log and crash summary to one file for support. The user name, machine name and MAC addresses are redacted, and you see the full text first. Plus battery health and a pending-restart check.
Safety	Detect, record, plan, show, apply, verify, log, undo. An append-only change history. Per-tweak revert. Honest about what cannot be undone.

Try the CLI

git clone https://github.com/Nowalski/Power-X && cd Power-X
dotnet build
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- status
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- process list --sort cpu --top 20
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- scan
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- tweak show privacy.advertising-id
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- profile apply lowspec --dry-run
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- crashes --since 7d
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- report --print
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- security
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- hash C:\Windows\System32\curl.exe
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- changes
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- storage C:\Users
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- reboot
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- battery
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- temps
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- tasks --telemetry
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- drivers --old
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- firewall
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- events --24h
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- config export my-setup.json
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- doctor
dotnet run --project src/PowerX.Cli -- history

The CLI and the GUI call the same PowerX.Core. Tweak logic is never duplicated.

Build

• 64-bit Windows 10 build 19041 or Windows 11
• .NET SDK 10.0.400 or newer (global.json pins it; rollForward: latestFeature)
• dotnet build and dotnet test for Core and CLI, no Visual Studio required
• The WinUI app: dotnet build src/PowerX.App/PowerX.App.csproj -p:Platform=x64 (no workload, no Visual Studio)

Installer

The MSI is built from installer/PowerX.wxs with WiX 5:

dotnet tool install --global wix --version 5.0.2
wix extension add -g WixToolset.UI.wixext/5.0.2
pwsh installer/build.ps1        # -> publish/PowerX-Setup-<version>-win-x64.msi

The app itself is unpackaged and unchanged. The MSI only lays down the self-contained publish folder, with the Visual C++ runtime bundled so it starts on a clean Windows install.

Repository

src/PowerX.Core    telemetry, tweak engine, profiles, debloat, cleanup, repair, transactions, diagnostics   (no UI deps)
src/PowerX.Cli     powerx.exe
src/PowerX.App     WinUI 3 desktop app (unpackaged, x64), built separately from PowerX.sln
installer/         WiX 5 source for the MSI
site/              the homepage published to GitHub Pages
bench/             BenchmarkDotNet harness for telemetry hot paths
tests/             xUnit + FluentAssertions
docs/              spec, architecture, design system, decisions, research

Principles

• Tell the truth. Real telemetry or "unavailable"; no fabricated zeros; no unverified FPS claims.
• Least unnecessary software, not the lowest process count.
• Progressive disclosure. Simple by default, deep on demand. Simple is not crippled.
• Weakening a security boundary is never "optimization" and never in a default profile.
• The tool must not be the resource hog.

Updates

PowerX checks a small version.json in this repo once a day (opt-out in Settings). When a release has a hash-pinned installer it can download and run it after you confirm; otherwise it just points you at the releases page. It only ever fetches from this repo's own GitHub releases over HTTPS and verifies the size and SHA-256 before running anything.

Support the project

PowerX is free and MIT-licensed, built in the open by one person. If it saved you time, GitHub Sponsors helps pay for a code-signing certificate (so the SmartScreen warning goes away for everyone) and the time to keep building. Starring the repo and filing good bug reports helps just as much.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE. No GPL or restricted code is imported; referenced projects are studied for behaviour and reimplemented from Microsoft documentation. Third-party components are listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md, especially Adding a tweak, which has a hard checklist: evidence, build range, revert, test, docs.

_{Not affiliated with Microsoft. Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.}