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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A few days ago, I blogged about BartPE, a well known tool for creating a Windows PE based rescue boot CD. Some readers recommended checking out UBCD4Win, which is an offspring of BartPE. The main difference between the two is that the UBCD4Win project is still alive while BartPE seems to have been discontinued. There is also no doubt that UBCD4Win is the far more advanced tool. The number of rescue utilities is impressive. And best of all – its Windows PE installation didn’t crash on my Dell Precision laptop, unlike BartPE.

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I was quite surprised when I checked the 4sysops list of free admin tools lately and found that BartPE is still not listed. BartPE’s PE Builder allows you to create a bootable Windows PE CD that contains various useful repair tools (file manager, disk management, check disk, etc.). BartPE is a great utility if you have to repair a non-bootable Windows installation or if you want to get access to the operating system while it is offline.

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Revo Uninstaller is a powerful alternative to the Windows Add or Remove Programs control panel applet. It comes with all the necessary tools to clean a system that has been overloaded with tons of useless applications. There is also a portable version, so you can launch it without installing it if you have to clean out a user’s PC of junk. These are the Revo Uninstaller tools, which I will describe below: Uninstaller, Hunter Mode, Junk Files Cleaner, Windows Tools, Auto Run Manager, Browser Cleaner, MS Office Cleaner, Windows Cleaner, Evidence Remover, and Unrecoverable Delete.

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Last year, I wrote a short article that explains what you can do if you forgot your password. Some of those who commented on the article recommended the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK), a free Linux-based recovery solution. However, TRK can do much more than just reset passwords. Like MSDaRT, which I reviewed some days ago, it can be helpful to recover a Windows installation in offline mode.

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Most Windows programs have to be registered to work properly. Registering means that the files of the application (exe, dll, ocx, etc.) store their information to the Windows registry. Usually, this is done during the installation process, but sometimes you have to do it manually if problems occur.

If an application doesn’t work, the first thing to do is to uninstall it and install it again. This often helps simply because corrupted registry entries have been added again to the registry. If it is a simple program with a couple of DLLs you can just register them manually using the regsvr32 command.

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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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KillProcess 2.32 is a free tool that allows you to kill multiple Windows processes with just a mouse click. This is especially useful if you have to deal with malware like viruses or trojans. Sophisticated malware uses multiple processes checking each other constantly. If one of them got terminated, then one of its fellow processes will start it again immediately. So Windows Task-Manager is often useless if you want to get rid of this kind of malware since it only allows you to kill processes one at a time.

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Some applications lock their opened files which means you cannot simply rename or delete them. In most cases, this makes sense and it is not advisable to circumvent it. However, there are situations where you might want to unlock a file, like when a program crashed and you want to delete its locked files. Usually you have to reboot for this, but you can do this faster with Unlocker, a free Windows tool.

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