SysInternals Utilities

SysInternals Utilities

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

If you learn all the tools, you can diagnose and troubleshoot some very complex system problems, crashes, annoyances, bugs, incompatibilities, CPU hogs, program lockups, etc.

There are a few utilities that are very useful by people who just want their computers to run well.

Process Explorer

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

Use this to easily see what program is hogging all your CPU time, and to kill a process that has died (um, gone comatose?)

I used its option to have it replace the default process list, so pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del starts this process tool.

“Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.”

Autoruns

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902

Use this to control what processes automatically get started at Windows startup.
(If you ain’t sure what a process is, don’t change the settings!)

“See what programs are configured to startup automatically when your system boots and you login. Autoruns also shows you the full list of Registry and file locations where applications can configure auto-start settings.”

Disk Usage

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896651

Du (disk usage) reports the disk space usage for the directory you specify. By default it recurses directories to show the total size of a directory and its subdirectories.

ZoomIt

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434

Presentation utility for zooming and drawing on the screen.

Lots More

The rest of the utilities are too techie for me, or give lots of information that I don’t have a use for (e.g. DiskView shows all sectors of a hard disk, but can’t change anything).

Show some restraint, and keep away, unless you are going to go through “Sysinternals Learning” to know what to use them for. There Be Dragons!

If you are going to learn, Mark’s Webcasts show you how to “troubleshoot the toughest Windows and application problems by watching Mark use Sysinternals and other advanced tools to solve real-world examples.”