SysInternals

Sysinternals is a suite of tools that can be used to manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose Windows systems. These tools are portable, meaning they can be run from a USB and do not have to be installed. They can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Technet site. You can download the entire suite, or the individual tools themselves as needed. If you do not wish to download them, you can use them through a service Microsoft offers called SysInternals Live.

Some of the more useful tools I’ve found are:

• Process Explorer – a more powerful task manager
• Process Monitor – monitors almost any kind of activity on your PC
• Autoruns – shows information on auto-start applications
• TCPView – shows detailed listing of TCP/UDP endpoints on your system
• Strings – view strings embedded in executable and object file

These are just a few of the available tools within SysInternals, and each could be reviewed and explained by themselves.

To use the tools from SysInternals Live, simply type \\live.sysinternals.com\tools into the Windows Run box. This will pull up a folder with all the available tools. To use a individual tool, type the the url followed by the name of the tool you want to use:
\\live.sysinternals.com\tools\[tool_name]

Microsoft offers their own guide to learning the various tools included in the Sysinternals Suite.