Sysinternals Suite

Sysinternals is a collection of advanced Windows system utilities from Microsoft. Every Windows power user and sysadmin should have these in their toolkit. You can also run them live without installing — just browse \\live.sysinternals.com\tools from Explorer.

• Process Explorer — far more powerful than Task Manager; shows parent-child process trees, loaded DLLs, open handles, and lets you kill or suspend processes.
• Process Monitor — real-time logging of every file system, registry, and network call made by every process; indispensable for diagnosing issues.
• Autoruns — shows everything configured to auto-start with Windows (registry, services, scheduled tasks, browser extensions); disable or remove unwanted entries.
• TCPView — lists all active TCP and UDP endpoints with the owning process; great for spotting unexpected network connections.
• PsExec — run commands on remote machines without installing a client; useful for IT automation and troubleshooting.
• BgInfo — renders system info (hostname, IP, uptime, OS version) directly onto your desktop wallpaper — useful in multi-VM environments.