Submitted by Jeffrey Botts, November 2007

You want network management software that works for you, not software that makes you work. You wish you could have it… without spending a fortune. Your wish is granted.

Introducing the free Spiceworks IT Desktop. Designed, tested and used by 160,000 IT pros in 185 countries (Michael’s update: Spiceworks is now used by 900,000 IT pros). Spiceworks has the everyday IT features you need:

• Automatic PC and software inventory and IT asset reporting to simplify your job.
• Network monitoring and troubleshooting to keep things running smoothly.
• Run an IT help desk for your company that’s easy to use and join the fastest-growing IT community.

It takes less than 5 minutes to get up and running. No agents. No scripts. No manual. No hassles. Just download Spiceworks and go.

Michael’s update: In addition to the above mentioned functions Spiceworks now also supports:

• Manage IT assets
• Manage changes & configurations
• Map your network
• Audit your software
• Manage power consumption
• Monitor SQL Server
• Be an MSP (Managed Service Provider)
• Talk to IT pros

Spiceworks 4.6 top new features

View & Kill Processes Remotely – See and terminate device processes directly from Spiceworks without having to leave your desk or run your remote control utility

Discover Your Virtualization Servers - Automatically detect VMWare virtualization servers to get a more complete inventory of your virtual machines, along with allocated RAM and hard disk space.

Get (Even) More Out of Your Help Desk – Resize your help desk to see more tickets at once. Get email notifications to see when tickets have been assigned so you avoid duplicating efforts. Customize ticket attributes right from you smart phone or PDA.

Search & Buy CDW Products from the Toolbar* – Increase your purchasing power by searching for and instantly buying CDW products you need without leaving  Spiceworks to open a new browser.
(*Only available in North America)

Get More Network Mapping Functionality – View all devices connected to your WAP, spread your network maps across your entire monitor, and locate all devices contained in your network map.

View Alerts Right in Your Spiceworks Toolbar – Pop-up notifications will keep you in the loop, whether it’s info on the latest Spiceworks plugins and reports, newly-added help desk tickets, or the latest Community posts.

Let Intel Help Save You Time & Money – Schedule your Intel vPro machines to remotely boot, suspend, or shut down to conserve power. And with Intel’s new SOL/IDEr Terminal plugin, you’ll have serial over LAN access to remotely boot and control the bios of your vPro enabled PCs.

Spiceworks 4.6 Screenshots

View & Kill Processes Remotely
Discover Your Virtual Servers
Expand Your IT Help Desk
Help Desk Email Notifications
Customize Tickets On-the-Go
WAP Support for Network Maps
Network Alerts in Spiceworks Toolbar
Search & Buy CDW Products from the Toolbar
Track Power Management Consumption
See More Spiceworks (without Scrolling)
New Featured Plugin: Intel’s SOL/IDEr Terminal

Spiceworks

• FREE: PC Audit – A simple system info tool (0)
• FREE: Bad Application – Test application crashes (0)
• FREE: ManagePC – Inventory and manage PCs (3)
• FREE: HealthMonitor – Monitor 60 different system states (0)
• FREE: Real Temp – Another CPU temperature measuring program (1)

At 1MB, PC Audit is small, and it doesn’t have to be installed. Thus, you can just send it via email to an end user. Because the tool has no whistles and bells, everyone will know immediately how to export the data.

PC Audit can also display product keys of the installed software and also of Windows. However, in my test, the latter only worked on Windows XP but not on Vista and Windows 7. Aside from that, the tool also works fine on the latest Windows version.

PC Audit

• FREE: Spiceworks – Network Monitoring & Help Desk Software (2)
• FREE: ManagePC – Inventory and manage PCs (3)
• Total Network Inventory – Reporting (0)
• Total Network Inventory – Inventory categories and software accounting (0)
• Contest: Win an unlimited worldwide license for Total Network Inventory (0)

First to consider is its modern user interface, complete with ribbon and tabs. This UI doesn’t just look better; it is also more convenient than Process Explorer’s old style interface. But, of course, some fancy icons are not enough to remove the king from the throne.

I can’t discuss all of Yet Another Process Monitor’s (YAPM) features. Everyone’s opinion may differ regarding which features matter, but here are the features I like most:

Remote process management

YAPM supports two types of remote connections: through WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and via the YAPM Server. If you use WMI, not all features will be available. For example, you can’t kill a process tree or kill a process by method (see below). If you connect via the YAPM Server, you first have to install YAPM on the remote computer and then start the server on that machine using the Windows Start menu. You can find the remote function on the client through YAPM’s start button. You have to click “disconnect” first before you can connect to a remote machine. By default YAPM is connected to the local machine when you launch the tool. Make sure that the server and the client use the same port.

Tasks / Jobs / Services / Performance Monitoring

YAPM not only allows you to manage processes but also tasks, jobs, and services. Tasks are what you can see under Applications in the Windows Task Manager, a feature that Process Explorer lacks. Jobs group processes together so you can manage them as a single item (for example, you can kill a couple of processes in one go if you terminate the corresponding job). You can add a process to a job through its context menu. Moreover, you can use the tool to monitor all Windows performance counters.

Kill method

Like Process Hacker, YAPM supports different kinds of kill methods. For instance, you can close all handles of the process or terminate all its threads. In some cases, this helps to get rid of the more persistent processes (malware for instance) that can’t be killed by a simple terminate command.

Dependencies

This feature allows you to view the DLLs that a process depends on. This can be helpful if you have to troubleshoot an application. Unfortunately, this feature seems to be working only on Windows XP and Vista but not on Windows 7.

Search

YAPM comes with three search features. You’ll find the first one, a search box, right below the ribbon. This search box also appears in the task and the services tab. YAPM sorts processes as you type. Strangely, the hits are displayed at the end of the process pane and not at the top.

On the search tab, you’ll find more sophisticated search functions. You can limit your search to processes, modules, environment variables, services, handles, and windows. The search box also appears on this tab so that you can easily search within the search results.

The third search feature allows you to look for processes on Google. You can access this internet search function through the process’s context menu. This feature comes in handy if you detect suspicious processes on a machine.

Network

YAPM also has network monitor that displays all TCP/IP connections. What’s nice about this feature is that you can locate the process to which a certain connection belongs by right-clicking the connection.

Just one further note: If you are trying YAPM on Vista or Windows 7, and you right-click a process, you have to hold the mouse button a few milliseconds longer than you are used to until the context menu shows up. (I observed this behavior under VMware Workstation. I didn’t have this problem with Windows XP.)

Yet Another Process Monitor

• FREE: Elevation Gadget – Drag and drop to elevate programs (0)
• FREE: Extended Task Manager – Find resource eaters (0)
• FREE: ServiWin: Manage Windows services and drivers (1)
• Raffle: VisualCron – Visual task scheduling (0)
• Raffle: VisualCron – Configuring cron jobs (0)

This tool is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7 compatibility. Free version allows to monitor up to 5 hosts, commercial version is also available and allows to monitor unlimited number of hosts.

EMCO Ping Monitor Free

• FREE: ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer – Network traffic analysis tool (2)
• FREE: PingInfoView – Another ping monitor GUI tool (3)
• FREE: Advanced Port Scanner – A port scanner for newbies (0)
• FREE: WinPing – A portable ping GUI (4)
• FREE: DHCP Reservation Manager – Easily migrate DHCP reservations (3)

NetFlow Analyzer is a, web based, bandwidth monitoring, network forensics and network traffic analysis tool that has been optimizing thousands of networks across varied industries for peak performance and helping them to put their bandwidth for a better use. NetFlow Analyzer gives detailed information on network bandwidth usage pattern for traffic analysis, capacity planning and making policy decisions. By drilling down into the specific applications, users, ports or communication network managers are able to determine the exact source of spikes and bursts and therefore able to proactively monitor, control, and take informed decisions. NetFlow Analyzer runs both in Windows & Linux. Cisco NetFlow, jFlow, sFlow, IPFIX are some of the few technologies supported by NetFlow Analyzer for network traffic monitoring.

During the first 30 days, you can monitor any number of interfaces with all the features. After the first 30 days, the product will continue to monitor 2 interfaces with all the features of the professional edition.

ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer

• FREE: EMCO Ping Monitor Free (3)
• FREE: PingInfoView – Another ping monitor GUI tool (3)
• FREE: Advanced Port Scanner – A port scanner for newbies (0)
• FREE: WinPing – A portable ping GUI (4)
• FREE: DHCP Reservation Manager – Easily migrate DHCP reservations (3)

Like WinPing, PingInfoView is a standalone application requiring no installation. The main difference is that Nirsoft’s tool summarizes the host responses in a table instead of continuously displaying each reply separately, like you are used to, from the command line interface.

The advantage of this format is that it allows you to easily monitor multiple hosts. PingInfoView can load the host list from a text file and you can also configure the tool to automatically start pinging a pre-defined list of hosts when you launch it.

Whenever a ping fails, the status symbol on the left hand side of the table will turn red. PingInfoView counts the failed and successful pings, shows the last ping time, the ping TTL, the average ping time, and when the last the ping failed or succeeded.

The only thing that I miss is a graphical output of the ping results. WinPing and PingPlotter have this feature. The downside of PingPlotter is that the freeware version can only ping one host at a time. The standard and pro editions have quite a few additional features. It is interesting to know how many different things one can do with the simple ping command.

PingInfoView

• FREE: EMCO Ping Monitor Free (3)
• FREE: ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer – Network traffic analysis tool (2)
• FREE: Advanced Port Scanner – A port scanner for newbies (0)
• FREE: WinPing – A portable ping GUI (4)
• FREE: DHCP Reservation Manager – Easily migrate DHCP reservations (3)

What distinguishes Advanced Port Scanners from similar tools is its wizard that helps newbies to configure the tool. For instance, the wizard asks how fast the computers in your network are and how many you have.

You can either scan a single computer, an IP range, or multiple IP ranges. If you often have to scan the same IP range, then you can use the tool’s save and load function. It is also possible to auto-load the last used IP’s list and port ranges on startup. Unfortunately, Advanced Port Scanner only supports port ranges, but you can’t work with port lists.

However, if you just want to know what open ports in your network exist, then this should be sufficient. Since the tool scans with multiple threads, it is pretty fast if you scan a local network. You can configure the number of threads, thread priority, the scan speed, the scan time out, and if computers should be pinged before they are scanned. The latter option speeds up port scans significantly because computers that are offline will be omitted.

What I like about Advanced Port Scanner are the three switches in its toolbar. They allow you to show only unknown computers (that were not pinged yet), alive computers (that respond to pings), and dead computers (that don’t respond to pings). It is possible to combine these switches, so, for example, you could show all unknown and alive computers.

You can export scan results into a text file. The tool has simple script language that allows you to format the output to your liking.

A comparable tool is SuperScan. What is your favorite port scanner?

Advanced Port Scanner

• FREE: EMCO Ping Monitor Free (3)
• FREE: ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer – Network traffic analysis tool (2)
• FREE: PingInfoView – Another ping monitor GUI tool (3)
• FREE: WinPing – A portable ping GUI (4)
• FREE: DHCP Reservation Manager – Easily migrate DHCP reservations (3)

Many applications exist that try to recover deleted files in these situations. Most professional recovery software is pretty pricey, though—it’s almost as if their producers want to make some extra bucks from your misery. If you ever find yourself in the unpleasant situation where you lost some files and don’t have an up-to-date backup, you might not care much about the price to get these files back. However, powerful recovery tools are available for free. One of them is NTFS Undelete. As the name implies it can recover deleted files from NTFS formatted drives.

The tool provides three functions: browse, search, and recover marked files. You can choose between them by selecting the corresponding tab. The preselected tab, Browse, shows an Explorer-like interface. When you click a drive on the left side to expand its view, a window pops up indicating that the drive is being scanned for deleted files.

The tool marks your deleted files and folders with a red X.

To undelete them just check the box next to each file or folder you want to recover. Then, click the tab “Recover marked files” and select a destination folder. Be careful here: Don’t recover files to the drive where the undeleted files lie or some of the deleted files could be overwritten with the recovered data. The recover tab offers some useful options, as e.g. unmarking the recovered file, and a recovery log. The search option comes in handy if you are looking for a specific file. It isn’t very sophisticated but it should fulfill your needs.

NTFS Undelete can only revive deleted files if they haven’t been overwritten. That’s a major drawback, but all other recovery applications suffer from the same limitation. Only highly specialized laboratories are able to recover physically overwritten data. Their service is far from free, as you can imagine.

The tool’s inability to recover deleted but overwritten files is especially problematic if the lost data lies on the system drive, where Windows constantly saves data. In that case downloading and installing NTFS Undelete is not an option as every further activity bears the risk of overwriting the deleted data. The best practice would be to shut down the computer immediately and recover the file without using the Windows installation on your hard disk. Fortunately the developers of NTFS Undelete also provide a bootable ISO image. When you burn this image to disk and boot from it, no data will be written to your hard disk until you restore the deleted data to another hard disk.

NTFS Undelete

• FREE: Farm Commander – Copy, move delete files on multiple servers (2)
• FREE: SQLSearcher – Search for SQL Server installations (0)
• FREE: FileTypesMan – File types manager for Windows (0)
• FREE: Q-Dir – File manager with admin features (2)
• FREE: Attribute Changer – Change file attributes recursively on multiple files and folders (0)

Administrator can give Password Reset Permission for a group/team, so those who are in the group/team can manage their own password related problem themselves. The Help Desk admin can securely reset passwords or unlock account for the managed users.

JiJiTechnologies Password Reset is free up to 50 users.

JiJi Help Desk Password Reset

• FREE: NetWrix Bulk Password Reset – Change the local administrator password network wide (0)
• FREE: JiJi Self Service Password Reset – Allows end users reset their password (1)
• FREE: KeePass – Open source password manager (2)
• FREE: Passgen – Set unique administrator passwords on multiple machines (2)
• How to handle the built-in administrator account (4)

The most important advice certainly is to change the password regularly. Since Windows still doesn’t come with the built-in functionality to reset the local password network-wide, you need a third-party tool. There are sophisticated desktop management tools such as Desktop Central Manage Engine and AutoAdministrator that let you perform such tasks easily. An alternative is the free command line utility Passgen, and yet another option is the graphical tool NetWrix Bulk Password Reset.

The main advantages of commercial solutions is that you don’t have to bother with exporting and importing computer names from Active Directory and that you can schedule password changes. This is especially important if you change the local administrator regularly, which is highly recommended.

NetWrix Bulk Password Reset is a fairly simple tool. You only have to specify the user account names and the new password. The computer names have to be entered manually or can be imported from a text file. You can use CSVDE or LDIFDE to export a list of computer accounts from Active Directory.

There also is ca commercial version that supports workgroup environments, re-processing of failed password resets, scheduled processing, and account en/disabling.

NetWrix Bulk Password Reset

• FREE: JiJi Help Desk Password Reset – Delegate password resets (0)
• FREE: JiJi Self Service Password Reset – Allows end users reset their password (1)
• FREE: KeePass – Open source password manager (2)
• FREE: Passgen – Set unique administrator passwords on multiple machines (2)
• How to handle the built-in administrator account (4)

For one thing, you don’t have to remember the ping syntax if you need a special parameter. For instance, if you want ping a host until you stop the command (parameter -t), you can just click on the corresponding option. Moreover, the output looks nicer and most important you don’t have to type “ping”. Considering how often you will have to type these four letters in your IT career without a GUI tool, this could mount up to a whole novel which you could have typed instead.

WinPing has a few other nice features: Multiple-hosts ping, export ping results, real-time graphical chart, average response time, and country codes. The Help Desk Geek has a more detailed review of WinPing.

WinPing

• FREE: EMCO Ping Monitor Free (3)
• FREE: ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer – Network traffic analysis tool (2)
• FREE: PingInfoView – Another ping monitor GUI tool (3)
• FREE: Advanced Port Scanner – A port scanner for newbies (0)
• FREE: DHCP Reservation Manager – Easily migrate DHCP reservations (3)

JiJi Self Service Password Reset is free up to 50 users.

JiJi Self Service Password Reset

• FREE: JiJi Help Desk Password Reset – Delegate password resets (0)
• FREE: NetWrix Bulk Password Reset – Change the local administrator password network wide (0)
• FREE: KeePass – Open source password manager (2)
• FREE: Passgen – Set unique administrator passwords on multiple machines (2)
• How to handle the built-in administrator account (4)

It is also possible to run multiple programs with admin privileges this way. You just have to select the corresponding icons and move them onto the Elevation Gadget. You can also type commands inside the widget to launch programs. The tool’s history buffer allows you to start previously launched programs.

I think, the Elevation Gadget is most useful if you have to fire up elevated scripts often. It is faster than through an elevated command prompt, because the gadget always sits on your desktop.

Unfortunately, one can’t drag text files onto the tool. For example, it would be nice if one could launch an elevated notepad with a text file from the Programs folder, by just dragging the text file to the Elevation Gadget. I still find it quite inconvenient that I can’t edit a file in these restricted folders by just double clicking on it. What is your solution to this problem?

Elevation Gadget

• FREE: YAPM – Yet Another (remote) Process Monitor (2)
• FREE: Extended Task Manager – Find resource eaters (0)
• Raffle: GFI WebMonitor 2009 – Web Security (0)
• Raffle: GFI WebMonitor – Web Filtering (1)
• Raffle: GFI WebMonitor 2009 – Web monitoring (0)

The lower pane shows all drivers that have been loaded when the system crashed. The ones that have been in the crash stack; that is, the ones that are most likely responsible for the crash can be highlighted. You can also display the original blue screen that Windows displayed after the crash.

The upper pane displays all dump files with the most important parameters: “Crash Time”, “Bug Check String”, “Caused by Driver”, “File Description”, etc. In my case, the revealing information was the value “DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE” of the Bug Check String. It indicates that the standby mode was the culprit. I don’t remember that I have ever had a computer where the Windows standby mode worked reliably. I suppose, Windows is much too complex for such a feature. There is always a third party driver that is sulking if it is forced to go to sleep.

Another crash was caused by my SATA driver (iaStorV.sys). Further investigation revealed that the power savings mode of an eSATA drive made my system unstable, so I disabled this feature.

BlueScreenView

• FREE: FixWin – Fix common Windows 7 and Vista problems (0)
• How to analyze Windows crashes (3)
• FREE: HWiNFO32 – Detailed hardware information and diagnostic (1)
• FREE: ManagePC – Inventory and manage PCs (3)
• Visual Subst – Map folders to a drive letter (2)

Hang process will just start an endless loop, which will change its window title to the well-known and often experienced “not responding”. I get this telling “not responding” message from Firefox and Outlook at least once a day. It is good to know that other apps have this feature, too.

Crash process reliably does what it is supposed to do. It crashes the Bad Application process, which will call Windows into action “checking for a solution to the problem”. As usual, Windows somehow can’t find a solution, so you better just hit the “cancel” button.

Now, you will probably ask, what the heck is such a tool good for? The answer is simple. If you want to test a monitoring solution such as System Center Desktop Error Monitoring, then you need an application that crashes reliably. It is not that it is difficult to find applications that crash regularly. The problem is that most applications only crash at the worst moment, but usually not when you want them to. There is no doubt that Murphy’s Law belongs to the best confirmed scientific laws.

Bad Application is also useful for Apple believers. If you want to convert one of your friends and make her support your church, then you just have to crash Bad Application a couple of times on her new Windows 7 laptop, and then show her the reliability history in the reliability monitor. If you look long enough at the curve, you might even be able to confirm your own religious prejudices.

Bad Application

• FREE: Spiceworks – Network Monitoring & Help Desk Software (2)
• FREE: HealthMonitor – Monitor 60 different system states (0)
• FREE: Real Temp – Another CPU temperature measuring program (1)
• FREE: GFI WebMonitor – Web filtering for ISA Server (1)
• FREE: SpeedFan – CPU and hard disk temperature monitoring (1)

If your computer behaves sluggishly, then there are usually three possible causes: An application occupies too many CPU resources, needs too much RAM, or keeps your hard disk busy. Free Extended Task Manager tool adds a third graph to the Performance tab that displays the disk input/output activity. This way, you’ll see all three important parameters (CPU usage, RAM usage, Disk I/O) at a glance.

Once you know which of the three parameters is affected, you can hover with the mouse over the corresponding chart. Extended Task Manager will then display the process that occupies most of the resources.

Another interesting feature is the “freeze function”. It allows you to stop a process without terminating it. As soon as you resume the process, it will just continue where it stopped. Thus, if an application demands too many resources at an inconvenient moment, you can just freeze it and let it continue once you have finished your work. A typical example is if a backup program keeps your hard disk so busy that the whole system performance is affected. However, I am not sure if all applications will like such rude intervention.

I also like the features that enable you to determine by what process a file has been locked. Locked files can’t be deleted or moved, which can be annoying at times. Free Extended Task Manager can display all files locked by a selected process and it can find all processes locking a specified file.

Free Extended Task Manager

• FREE: YAPM – Yet Another (remote) Process Monitor (2)
• FREE: Elevation Gadget – Drag and drop to elevate programs (0)
• FREE: ServiWin: Manage Windows services and drivers (1)
• Raffle: VisualCron – Visual task scheduling (0)
• Raffle: VisualCron – Configuring cron jobs (0)

Microsoft’s GUI for managing DHCP doesn’t provide any solution for this matter. Gladly I found a script called the DHCP Reservation Manager that does exactly what I needed: automatically migrate DHCP reservations. You can read about its features here. The tool offers four options:

• Migrate reservations from one DHCP server to another
• Synchronize reservations between two DHCP servers
• Dump leases
• Read reservations from a text file

In my case I just had to type the following command:

cscript rmanager.vbs Rmanager –migrate 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 all

The script correctly transferred all reservations to the new server. However, I realized that the script didn’t copy the description field of the reservations. As our organization no longer uses this field this was not a problem.

If you don’t want to synchronize every scope to another server, you can still use the tool because it allows you to identify which scopes to transfer. You can limit the scopes by adding them to the command:

cscript rmanager.vbs Rmanager –migrate 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.2 192.168.1.0 192.168.2.0 192.168.3.0

This command would add the reservations from the three subnets 192.168.1.0, 192.168.2.0, and 192.168.3.0 to the DHCP server. I don’t want to go into more detail here because the blog entry at blogs.technet.com is quite comprehensive.

This tool saved me a significant amount of time and made the migration as smooth as it can be. Everybody’s reserved IP address was retained after the old server was switched off. I doubt that this would have been the case if I would have moved them manually. Until Microsoft includes such a feature in the GUI, this tool is an acceptable alternative for managing DHCP reservations.

DHCP Reservation Manager

• FREE: EMCO Ping Monitor Free (3)
• FREE: ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer – Network traffic analysis tool (2)
• FREE: PingInfoView – Another ping monitor GUI tool (3)
• FREE: Advanced Port Scanner – A port scanner for newbies (0)
• FREE: WinPing – A portable ping GUI (4)

Remote Reboot X is very useful for sys admins to install updates on MANY remote computers simultaneously and then reboot them all with real-time monitoring.

The tool works in conjunction with WSUS, so if you have a WSUS server (or use Microsoft’s update server) but need precise control over when your computers install the updates and reboot, you can use my tool to handle the process.  So, for example, I have about 150 servers that need to be updated and rebooted once per month, but I only have a 1-hour maintenance window.  I’m able to load the list of 150 servers into my tool and initiate the updates installation and reboot on all machines simultaneously while monitoring the status in real-time.

If there is a problem either with installing an update or rebooting any of the machines (sometimes a machine might hang on reboot, for example), I learn about it immediately and can address it right away. To my knowledge there is no other tool that provides this degree of control.

The tool does not pull updates from WSUS to push to remote servers.  My tool simply tells the remote servers to install updates that they have already downloaded, or if they have not been downloaded it can initiate both the download and installation process.

Specific recommendations for best ways to use this tool are explained on my website, but generally speaking admins should use Group Policy to tell their machines to download but not install updates from WSUS. Then the updates are ready and waiting for the admin to initiate at his/her convenience using Remote Reboot X.

Remote Reboot X

• Contest: WuInstall 1.2 Pro – Install Windows updates on the command line and in scripts (4)
• FREE: WuInstall – Install Windows updates using a command line script (6)
• FREE: Secunia PSI – Scan for software vulnerabilities (2)
• FREE: Belarc Advisor – Builds a profile of your PC (3)
• Is Windows Server 2003 less reliable than Linux? (4)

Farm Commander

• FREE: NTFS Undelete – Easily recover deleted files (2)
• FREE: SQLSearcher – Search for SQL Server installations (0)
• FREE: FileTypesMan – File types manager for Windows (0)
• FREE: Q-Dir – File manager with admin features (2)
• FREE: Attribute Changer – Change file attributes recursively on multiple files and folders (0)

One of the advantages of Windows from a user’s perspective is that it comes with countless configuration options that can be changed easily. Competing operating systems either support much fewer options (the marketing guys of this company call this ease of use) or offer a comparable number of choices but only for command line geeks (the supporters of this OS often claim that GUIs are only for lusers or lamers).

From an administrator’s perspective, the disadvantage of this flexibility of Windows is that users can easily mess up their desktop. It is amazing how users manage to find new Windows switches you have never heard of. Of course, they will call you when they want to revert the change but have forgotten how they changed this setting.

In such a case, you can fire up FixWin and repair the mess with just a mouse click. I think, the idea of such a one-click repair tool is great. However, there are certainly more than 50 common Windows issues. Encourage the guys at The Windows Club to add more fixes in the future by emailing them your favorite Windows issues that you would like to see included in FixWin. I tried FixWin 1.1.

FixWin

• FREE: BlueScreenView – Display Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) information (0)
• How to analyze Windows crashes (3)
• FREE: HWiNFO32 – Detailed hardware information and diagnostic (1)
• FREE: ManagePC – Inventory and manage PCs (3)
• Visual Subst – Map folders to a drive letter (2)