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The Hidden Treasures of Sysinternals
Barence writes "PC Pro contributing editor Jon Honeyball has written a nice feature on the latest treasures to be found on the Windows Sysinternals website. Among them are a tool for creating virtual hard disks from physical drives, a hard disk read-write monitoring tool, and a utility for putting ISO images onto flash drives. They're free, but they're effective."
Process Explorer is what Windows should ship with instead of task manager.
Process Monitor is so kick ass... I can't even put it in words.
They're excellent for a wide range of things. Filemon (now superceded but still available) is an excellent tool for working out what files a piece of software is opening (eg. if you're trying to find config files). Regmon does something similar for the registry. Process explorer is stellar for getting more detail on a process than task manager will ever give (like where the image is running from and what DLLs it's using). Sysinternals filled a gap in diagnostic software. In a Windows environment they're as basic to me as netstat or ping. (speaking of which check out sysinternals tcpview). Especially good for tracing a user mode process right through. There are a lot of other utils to unlock the power of your Windows environment too.
Two sysinternals that weren't mentioned worth knowing about:
streams - view or remove hidden file streams attached to a file not normally seen in explorer. Especially good for removing that pesky "downloaded files are bad" warning when something is marked as being from the Internet zone.
junction - One of a handful of tools that allows you to create junctions (simliar to but not the same as hard directory links) in Windows XP.
The other non-sys-internals thing that every power user should know about is windbg and the debugging symbols. Indespesible for tracking down the culprit if you get blue screens due to device drivers (though obviously non-developers are not going to be able to do much about fixing the fault apart from downloading a different version or removing the device driver)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Don't forget live.sysinternals.com for instant access to any of the tools.
It says so in the readme file, and it's a feature not a bug to keep you from hosing your system because you didn't read the readme...
When you first fire up the new VHD it replaces the disk ID with a new one so that it's unique. This causes much trouble if the computer has two of the same disk ID at the same time when it goes to change one, as you might imagine.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
Might be a pain, but you can always use the /accepteula command-line switch...