Sysinternals Suite

Since Windows is one of the most commonly used operating system, most applications need to be compatible with its features to prevent errors. Before a program reaches the end user it must be tested and analyzed, and there are apps that come in handy for developers. Sysinternals Suite is a collection of system utilities designed to assist users in diagnosing and troubleshooting Windows applications and services.

Providing all necessary diagnosing tools in one package

The products inside the suite were originally co-developed and are currently maintained by Mark Russinovich, who is a well-known technical fellow of Microsoft. The developer was the co-founder of a company named Winternals, which was the original brand that most of the Sysinternals utilities carried.
However, Winternals was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and as a result, most of the applications issued by the former team are now owned by the Redmond company. All of them are available as separate downloads, as well as under the form of an all-in-one package, which is a more reliable approach for professionals, such as system administrators.
The suite includes over seventy utilities aimed to troubleshoot matters related to files and disk management, networking and security issues, as well as process and system information. Since the set is incredibly rich, analyzing each of them would take a considerable amount of time and as a consequence, we decided to concentrate on the most popular ones.

Keep an eye on running processes and manage startup items

One of the top downloaded utilities is Process Explorer, which retrieves detailed information about all running processes and produces memory statistics, allowing you to track down services to their original resources.
With the aid of AutoRuns, you can manage startup items, while Process Monitor provides real-time file system and registry activity monitoring. Administrators of Windows NT / 2K local and remote systems can use the command line options of PsTools to achieve fast process execution and to retrieve information regarding processes.
Other tools worth mentioning are RootkitRevealer (detects kernel-mode rootkits), TCPView (shows TCP and UDP endpoints), Desktops (manages your applications on a multi-desktop system), SDelete (overwrites sensitive data, then cleans the system in order to gain space), Sigcheck (identifies if images are digitally signed), to name just a few.

A few last words

All of the above considered, Sysinternals Suite is a reliable software collection that can help system administrators to diagnose and repair issues related to almost everything, from file system to network and security.