TechEd - SysInternals

If you have not heard of Sysinternals, it is great software site recently acquired by Microsoft which hosts a litany of diagnostic tools you can use to troubleshoot performance problems you might be having a server or even a personal PC.

The great thing about these tools (taken from the presentation):

• There is no install required
• Can run from a remote file share
• no garbage left behind
• small registry foot print
• single exe
• and other reasons...

The tools are divided in these categories:

• File and Disk
• Networking
• Process
• Security
• System Information
• Misc.

The most downloaded tools are:

• Process Explorer - which is the windows task manager on steroids. One neat thing about this tool is you can set up history for each process.
• Autoruns - which is great tool that allows you stop processes which were installed by programs that force themselves to be started on every start up.
• Process Monitor - is a log of each process which records and entry each time a process is triggered.