To this end, it is oftentimes useful, if not absolutely required, that I make my screen readable to my students or attendees.

Tool #4: ZoomItīecause I am a trainer, I do a lot of live presentations. Visit the Process Explorer home page for full documentation for this tool. As you can see in Figure 5, right-clicking on a process in the process list allows you not only to kill the process, but also kill the entire process tree, change runtime priority, debug the process, restart it, and so forth. The second thing I love about Process Explorer is the flexibility the tool gives you in managing running processes. Not only that, you also can display those processes in a tree view to determine parent-child relationships among those processes. However, Process Explorer lets you know what processes are currently in memory.

Like Autoruns, Process Explorer provides you with keen insight into what processes are running on the target system. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about Contig by visiting the Contig documentation home page at TechNet. This tool really speeds up my Outlook performance, let me tell you! I use Contig on a regular basis to defragment my Microsoft Outlook.

Tool #2: ContigĬontig is a command-line file defragmenter. Thus, you can use Autoruns to quickly diagnose a slow or malware-infested system, and take corrective action directly from the interface.Ĭheck out the Autoruns home page for full documentation on this wonderful utility. The reason why I love Autoruns is that the tool provides clear insight into exactly which processes and services are set to auto-start on the target system. If you want a “glossier” front end to the Sysinternals utilities, you can always visit the Windows Sysinternals home page at the Microsoft TechNet Web site. Can’t beat that for convenience, can you? No, the site isn’t anything pretty to look at, but the site hosts the latest versions of these tools, and they are so small that you can download and use them at any time on any Windows system with a single mouse click.

Microsoft sysinternals