As a software engineer (not system administrator), I found the following tools from Sysinternal to be useful.
- Autoruns: mainly used to turn off unnecessary executables during boot and login to speed up system boot performance
- Portmon: used to monitor serial port traffic (similar to wireshark for network traffic)
- Process Explorer: used mainly to find file locks, so that I know which process to kill to be able to free up the lock.
- Process Monitor
- PsExec: remote execute console application. Examples:
- psexec \\vm-001 ipconfig /all
- psexec \\vm-001 cmd
- This command copies the program test.exe to the remote system and executes it interactively: psexec \\vm-001 -c test.exe
- PsKill: kill local or remote processes. Mainly used in server software for house keeping (for example: kill stuck Office Automation process)
- PsService
- ZoomIt: usefuly for presentation. Zoom in screen, draw lines on the screen.
