For those of us who have been in IT for a while doing work in Microsoft environments before will know all about the great tools that the guys at Sysinternals provide, many will remember being worried when they got bought by the big beast themselves and they became part of Microsoft, but they have continued to provide excellent value add in terms of both costed products under the Wininternals brand and the free tools that go out via the Sysinternals brand.
Sometimes it is a royal pain in the backside getting access to these tool’s as you have to navigate the SysInternals site and individually download each tool from their individual page.
Now they have come to the rescue of us all and provided a new way of downloading them especially if you know the actual tool you need
The following is the text extract from the “About this site” text file
What is this? This is a file share allowing access to all Sysinternals utilities. We have developed this to test an alternate distribution mechanism for our utilities. This will allow you to run these tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract the zip file. If you are unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows Sysinternals, it is highly recommended that you visit the website at http://technet.microsoft.com/sysinternals before using these tools. If you have any questions or comments on this file share, please email syssite@microsoft.com Regards, The Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team
Thanks to the team for providing this method of getting access to their invaluable tools and Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to it.
Or even go one step further and keep your local copy sync’d via robocopy.exe e.g:
robocopy.exe \\live.sysinternals.com\tools C:\SysInternals
See: http://betanews.com/2011/06/03/microsoft-should-bundle-sysinternals-tools-into-windows-or-should-they/ (towards the end of the article).
-Alex
I’ve been using this for awhile and it is very handy.
Bonus tip. You can use robocopy to update your Sysinternals executables. The webclient service must be installed and running for robocopy to access a webdav share (on Win7 you have to add the Desktop Experience feature to get the webclient daemon). After that, something like
net start webclient #to get the service started
robocopy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools \path\to\bin
and all your tools are updated. QED.