Saturday 28 November 2009

VBUG Newcastle - A tour of SysInternals

Richard Diver, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, returned to Newcastle on the evening of 25th November 2009 to give a tour of some of the SysInternals tools which are available for IT Professionals.

Below are a few notes which I jotted down during the evening:

Process Explorer:


ProcExp.exe

Process Explorer can be used as a replacement for Task Manager.

Hide when minimized to always have it available.

CPU History can be viewed by opening the System Information graph.

Allows sorting of Parent/Child processes.

Enough data available to choke a whale.

The target icon can be used to find the process attached to a certain window/application.

Highlighting of processes can be found under Options -> Configure Highlighting.

Process Monitor


ProcMon.exe

Process monitor is a real time file, registry and process thread monitor.

When in doubt, use Process Monitor.

Enhancements over Filemon/Regmon include:
- More advanced filtering
- Operation call stacks
- Boot-time logging
- Data mining views
- Process tree to see short lived processes

ProcMon can see associated files or registry settings.

If using ProcMon on another machine, you need to capture data first over a period of time, then bring it back to analyse.

Autoruns


MsConfig.exe == Bad, don't use.

Autoruns.exe, is better than MsConfig, due the facet of having a lot more options to remove disable start-up process in a number of places.

Boot execute should be empty.



Resources

live.sysinternals.com
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals
Wikipedia Article
SysInternals Forum


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