My Notes to Myself and Others... : Sysinternals

Process Monitor 2 – Released!

Erik Rozman — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:44:08 GMT

If you ever had to troubleshoot a problematic system you have surely used
Process Monitor from Sysinternals (now Microsoft). If not,shame on you!

Process Monitor is basically Task Manager on steroids and so much more. A new
version of this tool has just been released,and according to the Sysinternals
blog it sports the following features:

“This major update to Process Monitor adds real-time TCP and UDP monitoring to its existing process, thread, DLL, file system and registry monitoring. You can now see the TCP and UDP activity processes performed, including the operation (e.g. connect, send, receive), local and remote IP addresses and DNS names, and operation transfer lengths. On Windows Vista, Process Monitor also collects thread stacks for network operations.”

Download it here.

Desktops from Sysinternals

Erik Rozman — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:49:31 GMT

It’s not a new concept but it’s still cool. Sysinternals have released a new tool
that allows you to have four virtual desktops. You can work on all four desktops
at once having different windows maximized/minimized in each:

You can download it at:

Desktops v1.0

One Major advantage of this tool is that it is a simple executable that has no need
for installations and it comes from Sysinternals…

Sysinternals tools Live!

Erik Rozman — Sat, 31 May 2008 12:29:04 GMT

Sysinternals was a company (that got bought by Microsoft) that has created a huge
number of troubleshooting applications for Windows. It is very likely that if you have ever
been engaged in troubleshooting a Windows system you have used one of their tools to
find the problem affecting the system.

The major issue I had with these tools that you actually needed to have them around with you
when you needed them - which in time of need you never had. Now, Microsoft and Sysinternals
have made these tools available to be started from the Internet (no more file hunting) at:

http://live.sysinternals.com

The first file in the directory is a text file that explains what they are trying to achieve through this
site:

What is this?

This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities.

This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file.

If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows Sysinternals, it is highly recommended that you visit the website at http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals before using these tools.

If you have any questions or comments on this file share, please email syssite@microsoft.com

Regards,

The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team

If you want to run one of their tools, instead of having to download the tool from the homepage,
you can use the following syntax at a RUN command:

\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname>

An additional interesting option is to add this location is a Network Location in Vista. This
way you will always have a folder available to you under the Computer icon with the latest versions
of the tool:

Double click the Computer icon
Right click an empty space and choose: 'Add a Network Location',press Next
Select 'Choose a custom network location' and press next
In the text box enter:\\live.sysinternals.com\tools and press Next
Choose a name for the location and press Next
Press Finish

Shell RunAs

Erik Rozman — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:21:39 GMT

The guys(specifically Mark Russinovich) at what was Sysinternals and is now Microsoft have
created a new goodie called ShellRunas. What this small (50k) tool does is to add the option
to start an application with a different users credentials from the GUI.

The download is a command line interface tool that allows you to register the GUI shortcut
with the following options:

Simple registration process:

And Viola: