Discussion on:

Five favorite Sysinternals tools and what they do

I'm surprised psexec didn't make the list, of all the tools it is the one I use almost on a daily basis as I have 650+ PCs to managed in a University lab environment.

I'll second that mention of PSExec. I even do a lot of my software deployments with a little scripting + PSExec. It's one of the most useful tools in my arsenal.

PSExec is one of the most useful tools I have and I use it every day. It's one of the tools Windows should come bundled with.

Now, if they can only fix the bug where it hangs when you press +C.....

I've found that a lot of times when ^C causes a hang while running a batch file remotely, it's because the remote system is stuck on a "Terminate Batch Job (Y/N)?" prompt. Often hitting Y[ENTER] will allow it to exit gracefully.


Jim

If you think the problem is bad now, wait until I fix it!

Find out when & where things go wrong.

Use just about all of them quite often. Like to use Autoruns to see if there is anything fishy being loaded in my system. At the same time, disable those "file not found" messages from software that was uninstalled but garbage left behind. Or maybe unused software such as the garbage left behind when removing Motorola Phone Tools.

Are 2 command built into Windows.
Always have worked and still do.

PsList (Tasklist) and PsKill (Taskkill).
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If you know what you are looking for:
NBTSTAT -a [computername] will give you the name of the logged on user as well.

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Process Explorer, PSExec and AutoRuns (haven't played with yet) definitely useful.

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Now if only Sysinternals would bring back a version of Wininstall LE that was more powerful and functional...

NBTSTAT won't return the logged in user if some of the netbios stuff is turned off on the network (as it is in ours). Sorry, don't have time right now to research exactly what it is that NBTSTAT uses, just know it's NetBIOS-related.

Thank you. Very helpful.