For the last 20 years or so, Windows power-users by the million have used the free utility programs released under the Sysinternals name. Microsoft bought the name, and the developers of the utilities, a few years ago and the tools have continued to be updated and upgraded.

There are now more than 60 of them. Some are relatively low-tech, such as ZoomIt. This lets you zoom in on part of the screen, and also draw freehand onto the zoomed section with your mouse. It's great for demos and presentations. At the other end of the scale, the more technical tools help you monitor the intricacies of your operating system and troubleshoot any problems that may occur. Perhaps the most well-known of these tools is Process Monitor, which shows you all the important PC activity in real time. This includes all accesses to the registry and to files. It's great for tracking down where a particular program is reading its settings from (eg, from a config file or a particular part of the registry), so that you can then change that data in order to tweak the program.

A few days ago, the Sysinternals crowd released a bundled version of all the utilities so that you can grab the whole suite in one go. It's a 20 MB zip file so there's no fancy installer or menu system. Just unzip, and then click on any of the tools that you want to run.
The system is malware-free according to Web of Trust and my own virus scanner. Because Sophos regards one of the tools as Potentially Unwanted Software (it allows you to run code on someone else's computer across your network), the suite loses one point from VirusTotal. However, Sysinternals is produced by Microsoft and is in use on millions of computers worldwide, and is thus perfectly safe to use.  Read More