There’s a great post on Michael.net about Sysinternals – Michael has listed each one with a brief description about what they do. It saves you a couple of hundred clicks on Microsoft’s site. These are a collection of utilities (that were acquired by Microsoft) that let you really see what’s going on in your computer. I use Autoruns & ProcExplorer regularly.

Autoruns let’s you see what loads at startup and let’s you check or uncheck specific items to allow or prevent them from running. I used it to turn off some horrendous AOL port controller that I couldn’t uninstall.

Procexplorer let’s you not only see what’s running, but see which files they are using and the paths for those files. Great for troubleshooting if you’re concerned you might have a spyware infection or if something is hogging memory or CPU cycles.

These two utilities are great – you just unzip and doubleclick – no installers, no restart. All software should work this way.