For those of you who don’t remember, Sysinternals was a Windows troubleshooting website that had a bunch of free tools to help you manage and troubleshoot problems with Windows. Microsoft purchased the company and it’s still called Sysinternals and it’s list of free tools has been growing ever since.
If you’re a technical support person who deals with a lot of Windows clients, a free troubleshooting toolkit from Sysinternals will make your life a lot easier. The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities is a newly released toolkit that contains 65+ free tools for diagnosing, troubleshooting and fixing Windows problems. You can download it here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062.aspx
Here is a list of some of the tools and a short description of what each one does. You can also go to the link above to see a list of all tools and click on each individual tool to see more details on how to use it.
AccessChk – See what kinds of permissions users and groups have to Windows resources like files, directories, Windows services, registry keys and lots more.
AccessEnum – Quickly see the read and write permissions for your entire file system and registry.
AD Explorer – A tool to quickly view and browse a Active Directory database. You can also take snapshots of the AD database for offline viewing.
ADInsight – Performs real-time monitoring of Active Directory client applications. It will intercept all calls between the client and server and is used to troubleshoot issues with authentication, DNS, Exchange, etc.
ADRestore – Lets you browse “tombstoned” objects in the Active Directory database and restore them.
AutoLogon – Allows you to save the username and password for a Windows account to log the user on automatically.
Autoruns – Has the most comprehensive list of startup locations and startup items on your PC. If you want something more detailed than MSCONFIG, this is the tool.
BgInfo – Displays useful information about your PC like IP address, memory, processor, etc automatically on your desktop.
Contig – A utility to defragment a single file on a disk.
DebugView – A program that will monitor debug output on a local or remote system. It can capture kernel-mode or Win32 debug output.
Desktops – A small utility to create multiple desktops on your system like a virtual desktop program, however it’s not virtual. Each desktop has it’s own explorer process and Windows desktop object.
Disk2VHD – Will convert a physical machine into a virtual machine that can run on Virtual PC or Hyper-V.
DiskView – Gives you a graphical view of your entire disk and where files are located.
Disk Usage – Command line tool to show you the total size of a directory and it’s subdirectories.
Handle – Tells you which program has a file or directory open. View open handles for any process on the system.
Hex2Dec – Convert from hexadecimal to decimal using this command line tool.
LogonSessions – Lists the currently active logon sessions for a system.
PageDefrag – Utility to defrag the paging file on your system.
Process Explorer/ Process Monitor - Two of my favorite utilities to monitor Windows processes and see which files and DLLs they have open.
PsExec – A telnet replacement program that lets you execute processes on remote system.
RootKitRevealer – An advanced rootkit detection utility.
ShellRunAs – Run a program as a different user using a nice GUI interface.
TCPView – Shows all TCP and UDP connections and which process has that port open.
There are lots more utilities in the troubleshooting toolkit that I did not mention here, so make sure you download it and add it to your USB arsenal. Enjoy!