Active Directory Reporting Tool (ADRT) allows you to sort user objects depending on a couple of important attributes: disabled, locked, expires, never expires, expired, password expires, password never expires, password expired, and never logged in. You can find this information with Microsoft’s built-in Active Directory tools also. However, with ADRT, it costs you just a mouse click to find out which users in your domain have been disabled for instance.

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AcessEnum from Microsoft’s Sysinternals tool collection enables you to list user accesses to a tree of directories or registry keys. With Windows Explorer or a registry editor you can only view access rights for a particular object, a certain folder, for example. If a directory has many subfolders it is difficult to figure out if access rights have been configured properly.

AccessEnum only lists the users and groups who have read or write access and where the deny attribute has been set. In most cases that should be enough though. What I like most about the tool is that it allows you to compare the current configuration with saved settings. This way you can easily find out if someone manipulated access permissions on a certain directory structure. If you right click on a column you can access the folder’s properties and you can also exclude a folder with its subfolders from the list.

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Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 is mostly for bigger companies that have to evaluate and mitigate application compatibility issues before deploying Vista. I have downloaded it before, but I found it too complex for a quick look. Some days ago, I stumbled across a post in the vista4beginners blog that seemed to have a solution for a UAC problem I had before. It describes how to disable UAC prompts for certain applications only. Unfortunately, it did not really work as I expected. But, at least, it made me play with the Compatibility Administrator which belongs to the Compatibility Toolkit.

This tool is quite interesting and it might be helpful if you have an application that is not running properly under Vista. Basically, you use the tool to configure how Vista treats a certain legacy application. For example, you can tell Vista not to use its virtualization mechanism when a legacy app tries to write in forbidden areas. There are countless other settings.

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Submitted by Jeffrey Botts

From the developers website:

What is NTop-XTRA?

When all is said and done, network traffic is a collection of computers talking to each other. ntop will show you - in an easy to digest form - a detailed breakdown of the conversations.

You’ll be able to see which computer is talking to which other computer, and what protocol(s) they are using. If you want to know who is utilizing your server the most then ntop is perfect for you. Do you have a WAN link that is full up and you don’t know why? Use ntop to break the traffic down so that you will see instantly where the bandwith is going.

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Submitted by Petar Weigand

Find out what is using your file system in a pie-chart display. To me it’s much easier to surf through pie charts to find out what is using the most of my free disk space. I’ve also deployed this utility to my end users because it’s so easy, free and platform independant.

From the publisher’s website:

JDiskReport provides different perspectives about your disk drives: absolute and relative sizes, size distribution, distribution of modification dates, and distribution of types.

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TCPView is a free Sysinternals tool from Microsoft allowing you to monitor TCP and UDP endpoints. It has the same purpose as the command line tool netstat that comes with Windows. Contrary to netstat, TCPView is a GUI tool. Usually, it is the first tool I use if strange things are happening on a computer, i.e. if I think that it might have been infected by spyware or other malware.

TCPView lists the process, the local TCP port, the remote address and the state of the TCP connection. If you want to get more details about the program, for example where the exe file is located, you just have to right click and select “Process Properties”. You can also terminate a connection or end the process.
There is a command line version of TCPView (Tcpvcon) which is similar to netstat. TCPView runs Windows Server 2008/Vista/NT/2000/XP and Windows 98/Me.

TCPView

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You might have heard that Windows 2008 Server Core has to be configured on the command prompt because it has no graphical user interface. Guy Teverovsky, the author of CoreConfigurator, proved this is to be a myth. This simple tool demonstrates perfectly that it is possible to manage Server Core with a GUI. Okay, this tool is rather simple, but it allows you to configure all essential settings of a freshly installed Server Core system. Note that CoreConfigurator is not a tool for remotely managing Server Core like RSAT. Teverovsky’s tool runs natively on Server Core.

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Regedit, the Registry editor that comes with Windows is a rather simple tool. It makes sense to use a third-party tool, even if you only have to edit the Windows Registry every once in a while. RegAlyzer is a free Registry editor with useful features.

My favorite feature is its search functionality. RegAlyzer supports different search criteria such as wildcards, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and even regular expressions. You can also limit your search by date (newer than, older than, between and outside of). However, the latter didn’t work properly when I tested it.

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Iometer is a free Open Source tool to test disk performance. Among others, you can measure the I/O transfer rate and the average I/O response time. Its first version was released 10 years ago for Windows NT. But it is still a useful tool because it also works under Windows XP/2003 and even with Vista and Windows Sever 2008. Iometer supports many different settings. In this post, I will just show you how to get started with this nifty free disk measurement utility. If you like it, you should consult its manual for further instructions.

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Submitted by Dan Shappir - Blog: Ericom Guy

This is an add-on product for Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. It extends Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services with features such as:

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