If you aren’t already familiar with the Sysinternals tools then you must go and check them out. They are of invaluable assistance when it comes to troubleshooting problems and gaining insight into what is happening on your machine.
I use these tools nearly every daily and would often return to the Sysinternals site looking to see if updates were available. With the launch of the Sysinternals Live service the whole suite of tools are now accessible directly off the internet.
Sysinternals Live is a service that enables you to execute Sysinternals tools directly from the Web without hunting for and manually downloading them. Simply enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as http://live.sysinternals.com/\{toolname\} or \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\{toolname}.
You can view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser at http://live.sysinternals.com.
Here are some of my favourite tools:
- If you do any presentation work then ZoomIt is a must have.
- Monitor the registry, file system and network using Process Monitor.
- Process Explorer is a great alternative to the Windows Task Manager.
- TCPView is great for monitoring network connections.
- Executing a process on a local or remote machine is easy with PsExec.
- Kill a process on a local or remote machine using PsKill.
- Shutdown and reboot machines using PsShutdown.
- See what files other computers have opened on your machine using PsFile.
There are many more tools to play with and you will likely find something you always wanted but never knew existed. Also, check out Mark Russinovich’s blog (one of the creators of Sysinternals) for interesting blog posts on the inner workings of Windows.