Lose of some good tools for windows...

[Dubh Aingeal]

In a move that will be good for Redmond but may have consequences for the rest of us, Microsoft has acquired Winternals and Sysinternals. This gives them well-known developers Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell as well as dozens of well-loved and much-praised utilities, both commercial and freeware. Though Mark says on his blog that the Sysinternals site will remain 'for the time being,' this would be a good time to download the latest version of essential Windows tools like Process Explorer before they can go mysteriously missing or be locked up behind the wall of Windows Genuine Advantage.

Grab them before they are lost forever!

[Msterbeau]

Any other recommendations? My eyes are swimming just looking at all the titles...

[Dubh Aingeal]

When ever we have had something blow out on us in some odd way the first site we would hit to see what kind of tools they had was Win/Systernals just to see if they had something that would help. I'm currently going thru and obtaining all the tools now since there is no telling how long they will be offered. All though with Microshaft now in charge of them I'm sure like a great many aquisitions they will disappear into the great void of the Microshaft closet. Never to be seen or heard from again.

Administrator's Pak from the Winternals site is pretty good. Me and another server admin used it from time to time to fix systems the Dev's f'd up with some bad code.

Before we got the Admin Pak we have used the Remote Recover v2.0 to pull data from crashed systems that just had to be rebuilt. Saved some time in the rebuilding process. Specially on those pesky Dev systems that seem to somehow become production even though they are never treated that way by the admins (ie no regular backups, etc).

NTFS for Windows 98 v2.0 Read-Only was used by me a far amount until we used the Remote recovery since the majority of recovery/boot floppies are 98 boot disks.

PStools would be good. Provided you know how to use a Dos prompt. Unlike many admins I have seen come thru our dept. If it didn't have a GUI they were completely lost and confused.

The NTRecover isn't bad either. We have used it for some of the execs laptops that didn't have floppies.

BGInfo is good to install on desktops so you can get info from the users easier. Since it places everything you want to know right on the screen.

If I was to suggest any of the tools the NTFS for Dos/98 and the Remote Recovery would be high on my list of suggestions. Simply for their reusablity factor.

[Msterbeau]

When ever we have had something blow out on us in some odd way the first site we would hit to see what kind of tools they had was Win/Systernals just to see if they had something that would help. I'm currently going thru and obtaining all the tools now since there is no telling how long they will be offered. All though with Microshaft now in charge of them I'm sure like a great many aquisitions they will disappear into the great void of the Microshaft closet. Never to be seen or heard from again.

Administrator's Pak from the Winternals site is pretty good. Me and another server admin used it from time to time to fix systems the Dev's f'd up with some bad code.

Before we got the Admin Pak we have used the Remote Recover v2.0 to pull data from crashed systems that just had to be rebuilt. Saved some time in the rebuilding process. Specially on those pesky Dev systems that seem to somehow become production even though they are never treated that way by the admins (ie no regular backups, etc).

NTFS for Windows 98 v2.0 Read-Only was used by me a far amount until we used the Remote recovery since the majority of recovery/boot floppies are 98 boot disks.

PStools would be good. Provided you know how to use a Dos prompt. Unlike many admins I have seen come thru our dept. If it didn't have a GUI they were completely lost and confused.

The NTRecover isn't bad either. We have used it for some of the execs laptops that didn't have floppies.

BGInfo is good to install on desktops so you can get info from the users easier. Since it places everything you want to know right on the screen.

If I was to suggest any of the tools the NTFS for Dos/98 and the Remote Recovery would be high on my list of suggestions. Simply for their reusablity factor.

Thank-you kindly for your assesment. I think they're mostly over my head though. DOS prompts make me walk away. :-P

Process Explorer should prove useful as I put more stuff back onto my recently reinsatlled system. There's always things I'd prefer to not have running in the backround, sucking up resources.