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

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. 

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

ShareWatch – see who is connected to a computer and what files they are accessing.

Have you ever wondered why your hard drive or modem is active, but you aren’t doing anything to cause it to be active? It is possible a remote user is accessing your computer.

Have you ever had a file locked but you don’t know why? ShareWatch can tell you if a network user is using the file and allows you to disconnect them so that you can edit/delete the file.

Have you ever wanted to shutdown a computer, but don’t want to drop people using the computer? ShareWatch will show you all resources in use by remote users.

Here are some features of ShareWatch…

• Watch shares on local and remote servers.
• Shows the users and computers that are connected to each share, along with what files are open.
• Allows you to disconnect any file, user, computer, or share.
• Address book lookup to show you the details about each user connected (this feature is turned off by default)
• Computer lookup to show you both the computer name and IP address of the computers connected.
• Can be run as a tray application.
• Supports top-most and transparency.
• Works on Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista.
• Multithreaded to allow servers to be queried independently from each other while not blocking each other or the user interface.

Windows 2000 Server management tools

Windows 2000 Resource Kit Tools for administrative tasks

Windows 2000 Support Tools: DCDiag.exe Utility Update

Windows 2000 Support Tools: Netdiag.exe Update

Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 Support Tools

Don’t forget to install the Support Tools from the installation CD.  Run \Support\Tools\suptools.msi.  An Alphabetical list of support tools can be found here.

Windows Server 2003 management tools

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools Updates

Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Administration Tools Pack

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 32-bit Support Tools

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 32-bit Support Tools

Windows Server 2003 R2 Administration Tools Pack (x86)

Windows Server 2003 R2 Administration Tools Pack (x64)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Performance Advisor

don’t forget about the Windows Support Tools that ships on the installation media.  To install support tools, run \Support\Tools\suptools.msi.  You can find a list of the support tools here.