Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities

Sysinternals Utilities has some of the best troubleshooting tools for Windows operating systems. They were created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell and later acquired by Microsoft in 2006. I've been using these tools since before Microsoft acquired them and find that 4 of the utilities are a must have, pskill, regmon, filemon, and process explorer. Filemon in particular provides real-time file monitoring showing what applications are accessing what files and whether there were read/write errors, access or otherwise; extremely valuable information when troubleshooting file based servers, such as, most mail servers. Pskill can terminate processes that will not stop. Very useful on Windows 2000 boxes where task manger will not allow you to end a task.

Now called Windows Sysinternals, accessible from Microsoft's Technet web site or www.sysinternals.com. I highly recommend that you check out these utilities to see if one of them can get you out of a troubleshooting bind!