Munckfish.net

Found a great site today: Sysinternals Freeware. It hosts various interesting and useful freeware Windows system monitoring utilities such as:

Filemon

For monitoring filesystem activety. Watch open files and see the processes which are accessing them. A lot like lsof on Linux.

Autorun

Generates a comprehensive listing of all applications configured to run during system bootup and login. I always knew a lot of stuff ran (cause of the huge time it takes to boot my laptop) so I was impressed to see the entire list finally. Maybe I can now start to work out how to cut the boot time down a bit.

Regmon

A lot like Filemon but monitors real-time access to the registry instead.

This is just a taster of what’s there. There are loads of other valuable looking tools there for exploring Windows’ internals.

One of the site’s owners, Mark Russinovich, has an interesting weblog on the site as well: Mark’s Sysinternals Blog. Seems he’s been digging into the internals of Sony’s DRM root kits recently: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far.