Sysinternals Tools are free and widely used by IT Administrators as they are handier than the built-in Windows Tools. With these tools, IT administrators no longer need to struggle to manage desktops because of the insufficient capabilities of Windows-native tools. In this article, I will show you how to Download and use Windows Sysinternals Tools locally. Please see How to install Sysinternals from the Microsoft Store, how to Use Active Directory Explorer from Sysinternals, and How to fix “The action cannot be completed because the folder or file is open in another program: How to determine where a file is open in windows“.
Despite the possibilities of the Sysinternals suite, many IT Administrators are yet to utilize its full potential of it. See the link for a comprehensive insight into the Sysinternals tools, and how to use the Process Explorer from SysInternals Tools.
Capabilities of the Sysinternals suite
The Sysinternals suite provides IT Administrators with better and greater control over their Windows systems than the operating system’s native tools. It is worth noting that, almost every Sysinternals tool works across every Windows Operating System.
The tool can be downloaded from his link: You can decide to download an individual tool or the entire suite. Below is a screenshot of all available tools in the Sysinternals suite and there is no way I can discuss all of them.
I will take a look at some of the most recent tools I have used and will continue to discuss these tools in detail subsequently in the future. Some popular Sysinternal tools will be discussed below. Take a look at the screenshot for many other Sysinternals Tools that are available.
The Sysinternals toolset as shown in the images above consists of many utilities such as the Autorun, Zoomit.exe, File and Disk, Networking, Process, Security, System Information, etc. These tools can be used to measure network performance, remotely execute processes, dump event log records and much more.
How do individual Sysinternals tools work?
Every tool in the Sysinternals suite works differently from the other and as discussed previously, they are more effective than the built-in Windows tools such as the Process Explorer which can be used in place of the built-in Task Manager.
Also, Autoruns helps IT professionals identify and remove any software that may be slowing down a computer. Please see Sysinternals: Installing from the Microsoft Store Guide.
Process Explorer
This is the most widely used Sysinternals tool and it helps visualise details about every processor and active DLL session in your system, kill and suspends processes set process priority, and gives graphical statistics about CPU, memory and I/O usage, a tree view to show processes and their dependencies.
This tool is executed by running the procexe.exe application and does not require any execution or whatever. To terminate a process, select the process and press the Delete key.
Process Monitor
Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. See the following link for more details.
Auto Logon
AutoLogon provides the means to configure Windows built-in auto logon. Here the user does not need to enter his username and password, the systems (windows) automatically logon to his/her workstation.
The credentials entered into the AutoLogon are used to create and encrypt the credentials in the Registry. See this article on how to configure this autologon.
PsTools
This tool allows for the possibility to manage remote systems as well as local ones. The first tool in the suite was PsList, a tool that lets you view detailed information about processes. The suite is continually growing. The tools included in the PsTools suite, which is downloadable as a package are:
Below is the explanation of the tools above.
– PsExec: Execute processes remotely
– PsFile: Shows files opened remotely
– PsGetSid: Display the SID of a computer or a user
– PsInfo: List information about a system
– PsPing: Measure network performance
– PsKill: Kill processes by name or process ID
– PsList: List detailed information about processes
– PsLoggedOn: See who’s logged on locally and via resource sharing
– PsLogList: Dump event log records
– PsPasswd: Changes account passwords
– PsService: View and control services
– PsShutdown: Shuts down and optionally reboots a computer
– PsSuspend: Suspends processes
– PsUptime: Shows you how long a system has been running since its last reboot.
– The PsTools download package includes an HTML help file with complete usage information for all the tools.
Run the PsExec.exe and agree to the license terms
Run the CMD as an administrator and type
- PSEXEC -i -s cmd to launch CMD as System.
Focus on PSExec and how to use it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexecSee step 4 on how I have used this tool to set up a Single App Kiosk Mode Configuration using MDM Bridge WMI Provide.
I hope you found this article useful on how to Download and use Windows Sysinternals Tools locally. Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions.