the back room tech utilities for December 20, 2007

The great Sysinternals suite has been updated.

Defraggler – freeware Windows defrag utility than can defragment specific files rather than the entire drive at once.

Microsoft Genuine Advantage – Diagnostic Site

Sysinternals Suite has been updated

The wonderful Sysinternals Suite of utilities was released December 18, 2007. According to their web site:

The Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities have been rolled up into a single Suite of tools. This file contains the individual troubleshooting tools and help files. It does not contain non-troubleshooting tools like the BSOD Screen Saver or NotMyFault.

The Suite is a bundling of the following selected Sysinternals Utilities:

AccessChk

AccessEnum

AdExplorer

AdRestore

Autologon

Autoruns

BgInfo

CacheSet

ClockRes

Contig

Ctrl2Cap

DebugView

DiskExt

DiskMon

DiskView

Disk Usage (DU)

EFSDump

FileMon

Handle

Hex2dec

Junction

LDMDump

ListDLLs

LiveKd

LoadOrder

LogonSessions

NewSid

NTFSInfo

PageDefrag

PendMoves

PortMon

ProcessExplorer

Process Monitor

ProcFeatures

PsExec

PsFile

PsGetSid

PsInfo

PsKill

PsList

PsLoggedOn

PsLogList

PsPasswd

PsService

PsShutdown

PsSuspend

RegDelNull

RegJump

RegMon

RootkitRevealer

SDelete

ShareEnum

SigCheck

Streams

Strings

Sync

TCPView

VolumeID

WhoIs

WinObj

ZoomIt

Microsoft Genuine Advantage – Diagnostic Site and Downloadable Utility

These diagnostic pages will help you ensure that your Mozilla Firefox Web browser (1.0.5 or later) settings are configured properly to see images and run scripts. They will also ensure that the appropriate helper applications, such as the Genuine Advantage Plug-in for Firefox, is installed.You will be walked through the troubleshooting process step by step. If your configuration settings are not correct, you will be provided with suggestions to resolve the problem. If your problem persists, you will be provided with information about where you can obtain additional assistance.

Note: Running Microsoft Genuine Advantage diagnostic process will not automatically restart the validation process. It will only help configure your computer as needed to run the validation process.
What will be checked?

* If scripting is turned on
* If images display correctly
* If the System Date and Time are relatively correct
* If cookies are enabled
* If the Microsoft Genuine Advantage plug-ins load correctly
* If the Microsoft Genuine Advantage plug-ins are able to successfully connect to the validation servers

You can also try the MGA downloadable utility.

Defraggler

Piriform’s Defraggler is a nice defragmentation utility with a relatively small footprint (less than 1MB). My favorite feature is you can select individual files to defragment rather than processing an entire drive.

Freeware, supported OSs are Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista, including 6-bit support. Download here.

Piriform also makes Recuva and CCleaner – check out their blog for updates.

PortQry and PortQry UI

PortQry and PortQry UI are related to Port Reporter.

Portqry.exe is a command-line utility that you can use to help troubleshoot TCP/IP connectivity issues. Portqry.exe runs on Windows 2000-based computers, on Windows XP-based computers, and on Windows Server 2003-based computers. The utility reports the port status of TCP and UDP ports on a computer that you select.   PortQry UI is a user interface for those who do not want to use the command line version.

See KB 832919 and KB 310099 for instructions on using PortQry.

See my previous post for additional details about these tools as well as Port Reporter. 

Microsoft Port Reporter and Port Reporter Parser

Microsoft Port Reporter runs as a service on computers that are running Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000. The tool logs TCP and UDP port activity and it’s data can be analyzed by using the Microsoft Port Reporter Parser.

See my previous post for additional details about these tools. 

Simple script to integrate the SLES10SP1 DVD and OES2 DVD into a single installation source

OES 2 linux is a add-on-product for SLES 10. The makeoes2dvd.sh script takes the OES 2 ISO and the SLES 10 sp1 iso, and creates a single integrated ISO file. The DVD image can then be used to install OES2 without having to manually add the OES 2 add-on product. During the install OES2 is automatically added on when install with the DVD image this script creates.

Pstart – portable app to create menus for launching programs

PStart is a simple tray tool to start user defined applications. Designed to run portable applications (like portable Firefox & Thunderbird), you can start anything runnable from USB key devices or removable disks.

• Install PStart locally to your hard disk to have an additional start menu with a quick program search feature.

• Install PStart to your USB stick to launch portable applications easily and open important documents or folders.

PStart is 100% freeware, but donations are appreciated

Microsoft User Profile Hive Cleanup Service – A service to help with slow log off and unreconciled profile problems

The Microsoft User Profile Hive Cleanup service (UPHclean) helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is “Access is denied”. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.

Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP

AutoPatcher is back (sort of)

You can find the updated AutoPatcher Updater here. In case you’re not familiar with AutoPatcher, it’s a wonderful program that slipstreams Microsoft patches and updates into a Windows XP distribution point or CD. I’d integrate the updates of my choice into a CD to use for my unattended Windows XP deployments.

Back in August Microsoft sent the AutoPatcher folks a cease and desist order. It seems Microsoft’s big contention was AutoPatcher was a method of circumventing Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), their mechanism for ensuring pirated copies of their software were not able to download updates.

Ghacks.net has some nice screenshots of the AutoPatcher Updater interface.