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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."
The tools on sysinternals are tools that should come with windows from day one.
Yeah. And an image editor - wait, no, 3 image editors a few which work only on the command line. And five word processors. Ten calculators. A utility to write random data to the disk.
The average user doesn't need these tools. The people who can make use of them without messing other things up already know about them.
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Microsoft bought Sysinternals because Process Explorer was outing them in terms of what they were doing COVERTLY on Windows machines.
I proved this to myself by using the latest version of Process Explorer, copying the results, wiping my hard drive (I was about to do a reformat anyways and decided it was a good time to do some experimenting), reinstalling the old, PRE-MS version of Process Explorer (v.10.20)...and getting different results as far as what Microsoft was running in the background. I simply compared the results, and they were different...on the exact same Windows install. I do not remember what was different, nor do I care. The point is that they were HIDING something from Process Explorer (any version post 10.20) now that they had control of the once-3rd-party app.
Another slimy thing they do is retroactively replace older versions of Process Explorer with the new version ON DEVICES THAT DO NOT EVEN RUN WINDOWS.
I have numerous thumb-drives that I have wiped entirely clean and installed my own selection of tools and open-source apps on. I then loan them to friends to fix their own machines (as well as provide them with non-MS, non-Adobe alternatives). All of these drives have Process Explorer v10.20 on them. Often, they would be returned only to find that the v10.20 had been over-written with the latest version. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. ANY version of Windows, post XPsp2, has the latest version of Process Explorer buried in it somewhere and will AUTOMATICALLY over-write any old version, REGARDLESS OF WHERE IT IS FOUND. So, if you have v.10.20 on a thumbdrive and plug it into a post-XPsp2 machine, the machine will change the executable on the drive to the latest version without permission. I now have to keep a known-clean version of v10.20 secure from such monkey business.
Good luck finding version 10.20 though. I ended up having to get my copy from a CHINESE server, as Microsoft had cease-and-desisted everyone offering the old versions even though they were not charging for it.
To be blunt, I do not trust Sysinternals or any of their products anymore.