Pretty much anyone in the IT business should know about sysinternals tools. They are a set of tools written by Microsoft staff that give administrators and support staff an inside edge on system management and diagnostics. You can get the full details at sysinternals.com, there are over 80 tools that help in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to start describing them. Some help with AD (AD Explorer and ADInsight), some (Process Explorer) offer better information than Resource Manager (or Task Manager depending on your OS), others (TCPView) are network based, one provides 3 ‘virtual’ desktops (Desktops is a brilliant productivity tool), one simply provides a zoom facility on your PC (every presenter should know about ZoomIt) and so on.

Up until now there have been updates to some of these tools and you have had to keep your eye out to go and get the latest update. From now on however you only need to download the sysinternals sync tool from Kenny Kerr at http://kennykerr.ca/2013/01/04/synctools-for-sysinternals/. This tiny app will download the whole sysinternals tool set to your PC and then whenever you run it will download a new version of any tool that has been updated since you last ran the tool. Brilliant! Kenny suggests running it whenever you hear about a change to one of the tools but it seems to me that a scheduled task to run the SyncTools.exe on a weekly basis will automatically update your toolset.

I wholly recommend checking this out and having sysinternals tools on your PC and servers.