Sysinternals: an underappreciated utility suite

By Lincoln Spector Digging down into the heart of Windows is rarely fun (for most of us) but sometimes necessary. As with any excavation job, success comes down to having the right shovel. Luckily, Microsoft’s Windows Sysinternals provides you with about 140 different shovels — all free and portable.

Most devoted Windows users know the history of Sysinternals (info) by now. In short, Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell started writing these small utilities back in 1996. Ten years later, Microsoft bought the products, the name, and the creators’ services. Still regularly updated and augmented by Russinovich and Cogswell, the apps can now be downloaded from Microsoft’s TechNet site.

I’m going to discuss the two most popular and powerful utilities, Process Explorer and Process Monitor, in detail. Then I’ll briefly describe a few other Sysinternals programs worth looking at. But this only scratches the surface of the entire Sysinternals collection.

Acquiring Sysinternals — the suite or the index

Before getting into the specific apps, I need to say a few words on the download process.

You can download most of the Sysinternals programs as a single file called the Sysinternals Suite (download page). This really isn’t a suite; it’s just a 13MB .zip file containing the programs.

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