Sysinternals Tools

For troubleshooting issues on Windows, the very best free tools can be found in one place - Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft, and hosted in Technet). These tools, written by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell are elegant, efficient, and always useful when diagnosing or troubleshooting issues on Windows.

To give one simple example; Why is my PC so slow? Well, procexp shows low CPU but total disk I/O delta shows a few processes being very active, and procmon lets you see detailed file/network/registry access for all or specific processes. What it told me:

• Snarl system monitor extension was too intensive checking the network status.
• GoToMeetinglauncher was obsessed with constantly reading file attributes for all running processes, even though no meeting was underway.
• TrueImageMonitor was perpetually writing it's SystemState.xml.
• ExistDB's wrapper.log had been left in debug mode and was writing too much
• htcUPCTloader was perpetually recreating it's detecteddevice.xml and detecteddevice_resp.xml files.
• Oracle DB was continually writing an error into alertXE.log
• Windows SearchProtocolHost was trying to digest a 2gb db file which is written by the Oracle Beehive Outlook extension, despite being told to ignore everything under c:\Users\...\AppData
• McShield and Windows Search were perpetually re-reading various files of the above.