FolderChangesView is an interesting troubleshooting tool which displays the files currently being created, modified or deleted on your PC. As a process writes to your drive, you'll see the name and path of the relevant file; whether it's being created, modified or deleted; and the date and time when the activity occurred.

What's the point? If your hard drive is very busy and you're just wondering why, say, seeing the files being affected may tell you what's going on. This may help you to detect malware. And if you realise that a particular program is causing the writes, and figure out how to stop it, then you may be able to noticeably speed up your PC.

Accept the FolderChangesView default settings and it'll show you everything that's happening on C: (or your system drive, if different). Which may generate rather too lengthy a report.

You can get more specific by specifying a "Base folder to monitor", though (do this at launch time, or by pressing [F9]). So if you only want to see file changes in the system folders, say, you might enter C:\Windows here, and the program will then only display files created, modified or deleted in that or (optionally) lower folders.

What you can't do, slightly annoyingly, is delete an item in the report. If you see a group of file changes you don't need then you can't select and remove them. The best you can do is stop and restart the monitoring, which will clear the list for you.

Still, FolderChangesView still remains a compact and handy utility which needs to be a part of your PC's troubleshooting toolkit.

Version 2.31:

Added option to execute a command when there is a new item or existing item is updated. (In 'Choose Folder' window)
You can use the following variables in the command string: %Filename%, %FullPath%, %Extension%, %FileOwner%, %ModifiedCount%, %CreatedCount%, %DeletedCount%, %RenamedCount%, %FirstEventTime%, %LastEventTime%, %FileSize%, %ModifiedTime%, %CreatedTime%, %EntryModifiedTime%, %Attributes%
Command example: c:tempmyexe.exe "%FullPath%" "%FileOwner%" "%LastEventTime%"