In this article you will be introduced to four Windows Sysinternals utilities that the author feels may improve your productivity and enhance your system’s security.

The four reasons why I enjoy the Microsoft Sysinternals utilities so much are:

• They consume very little system resources
• They are self-contained—there is no installer and you can run the tools directly from USB media
• They are extremely well documented
• They are free!

What are the Sysinternals utilities, you ask? This is a collection of freeware Windows system tools originally developed by these two geniuses from Austin, Texas, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. Microsoft bought the toolset (and company) from Russinovich and Cogswell in 2006 and took the men on as employees, where they continue to enhance the tools, write about them, and so forth.

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A 4sysops reader recommended the freeware tool Windows System Control Center (WSCC) as an alternative to NirLauncher, the portable free launcher. I tested WSCC and it is indeed an interesting tool, not only as an admin utility but also as an example of how Windows could morph into a cloud operating system.

Even though WSCC isn’t delivered with the Sysinternals or the NirSoft tools, you can use all these great free admin tools immediately without the need to download because WSCC just launches them through the web. For the bigger tools, this can increase the time it takes for the tool to start. However, if you launch the utility a second time while WSCC is still open, it will be loaded from a local cache. Of course, the launch speed depends on your available bandwidth.

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Microsoft’s Sysinternals Autoruns is a free portable tool that allows you to manage Windows startup programs. It is certainly the most comprehensive startup manager for Windows 7, Vista, and Windows XP.

I added the tool to the 4sysops database of free admin utilities almost three years ago. Since Autoruns 10, which was released yesterday, is a major update I had a look at the new features. For those who don’t know this essential admin tool yet, here is the revised introduction of my original review:

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Last week, you couldn’t hardly find an IT-related blog that didn’t announce this new free Sysinternals tool. Disk2vhd copies the contents of a physical disk to a virtual disk in Microsoft’s VHD format. Since Disk2vhd uses Windows’ Volume Snapshot capability, you can use the tool while the physical machine is online. In theory, it is possible to convert a physical system drive to a VHD.

The size of the standalone tool is only 670KB, so you shouldn’t expect wonders. I tried Disk2vhd on a Windows 7 system. I encountered my first problem with it when I had to decide which partition to convert. My boot and my system partition are separated. I selected them both and Disk2vhd packed them in one VHD file without complaining. The result was that neither Virtual PC 2007 SP1 nor the successor Windows Virtual PC was able to recognize the VHD. I didn’t try it with Hyper-V, but, I guess, the result would have been the same. Perhaps, it would have worked If I ran the tool twice to create two separate VHD files. But I didn’t explore this path because I have a 64-bit system and Virtual PC doesn’t support 64-bit guests.

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When I tried the new Procmon 2.6, I couldn’t access the tool’s help file, which is a problem I have often encountered when downloading a Sysinternals tool. I have figured out now what went wrong and I thought I should note down the solution once and for all. I think, my blog is the best place for it because I am probably not the only one who run into this problem: The table of contents in the left plane is displayed correctly, but the contents pane only shows “Navigation to webpage was cancelled – What you can try: Retype address.”

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Sysinternals Process Monitor (Procmon) is one my favorite free tools. Microsoft recently released version 2.5, and just a few days ago Procmon 2.6 fixed a bug on Windows 7. I had a quick look at the new features. I just added this text to my former review of Process Monitor 2.0 at the end. If you already know Procmon, you can skip the introductory text and read about Procmon’s 2.6 new features.

This well-known Microsoft tool was already in the 4sysops free admin tool list, but I decided to add a new entry because a new version is now available. The old post was also about Process Explorer, which I reviewed two years ago. I transferred your votes to these articles.

I guess that Process Monitor is in the tool box of many admins, because it is one of the most important troubleshooting tools. The old version, 1.37, allowed you to monitor file system and registry activity. The most important new feature of version 2.0 is that you can now also monitor the network activity of processes.

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• Interview with Mark Russinovich: the future of Sysinternals, Security, Windows
• Windows 7 — Approach to System Performance at the Engineering Windows 7 blog (Microsoft site)
• Xen 3.3 now available. New: Power management (P & C states) in the hypervisor, Shadow3, CPUID feature levelling and more.
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is publicly available. Nice new features. But I doubt that they can stop the Firefox growth.
• Microsoft’s plans about virtualization An interview with Microsoft representatives. Interesting!
• Microsoft delays the Hyper-V Integration Components for Linux, removes the RC version. We are already waiting…
• Comprehensive VMware ESX-Microsoft Hyper-V comparison. This article by Clay Shekleton compares architecture and features.
• Small Business Server 2008 has released to manufacturing (RTMed)

Microsoft’s Sysinternals tools are now ”live”. When I read this today, I wondered how this could possibly work. I mean, how can you integrate a bunch of sophisticated system tools in a Web site? I was quite disappointed, when I saw that Sysinternals Live is nothing other than a directory on a Web Server, which contains all of the Sysinternals tools.

The directory only lists the DOS-style name of the Sysinternals tools. If you are not a Sysinternals geek, you will hardly find your way around in there. So what is the purpose of this? Well, you can launch the Sysinternals tools from the command prompt with \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname>. This is could be useful, if you work on a desktop where you don’t have your toolbox at hand.

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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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ShellRunas v.1.0 is a new Sysinternals tools by Mark Russinowich. It enables you to run a program with different credentials from Windows Explorer. The tool works with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Tools such as RunAsAdmin or RunAsLimitedUser allow you to run commands only with a certain account. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 already have this run as option in the context menu of Windows Explorer. Microsoft removed it for some reason in Windows Vista and Server 2008. ShellRunas weeds out this mistake. You can use ShellRunas from Windows Explorer by right clicking on the application you want to start and then on “Run as different user”.

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Nick MacKechnie reports that some Sysinternals tools have been updated. PSExec v1.90 improves handling of arguments, BgInfo v4.12 offers improved reporting, Process Explorer v11.04 fixes a memory leak, ADExplorer v1.01, DebugView v4.72 and Process Monitor v1.26 fix some minor bugs.

Submitted by Christoph Kral

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities for the various aspets of Windows administration. (Not only Procmon or Proc Explorer)

Sysinternals Suite

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Submitted by Colin Bowern – Blog: Colin Bowern When it comes to figuring out why something isn’t operating the way it should having a view of the process, file, and registry activity gives you insight that is indispensible.

Process Monitor and Process Explorer

Microsoft has released the free Sysinternals Process Explorer 11. Most of the new features are related to Vista. Not everything is improved, though.

Process Explorer is certainly a must-have tool for any admin. I blogged about Process Explorer 10 a while ago. What I don’t like about it, is its sparse documentation. Some of the new features sound quite interesting, but searching for them in the Help file won’t reveal much in most cases. For example, I wanted to find out what “Show details for all processes elevation menu item on Vista” is supposed to mean. But my full text search for “elevation” got no hits.

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I just ran across the new McAfee Rootkit Detective 1.0. There are so many anti-rootkit tools available now, and it’s about time that McAfee comes out with its own free rootkit detection utility.

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