Windows isn’t known for its stability. Even if you’re just using it normally, sometimes things just break. Fortunately, Microsoft provides an incredible suite of tools that can help you diagnose and fix almost any problem a Windows PC may have.
What is Sysinternals?
Sysinternals began as a suite of tools developed by a third party for diagnosing and troubleshooting the Windows operating system in rhe early 2000s. Eventually, Microsoft acquired them, and they’ve been officially supported by Microsoft since.
Despite how useful they are, they’re not included in Windows by default—much to everyone’s loss. They’re some of the best troubleshooting tools available for Windows, regardless of the problem you have.
Most of the troubleshooting tools in Windows are designed to be very “hands off.”
You run the troubleshooting wizard, it tries a few things behind the scenes to resolve the issue, and if it can’t, you’re helpfully told that it couldn’t resolve the problem.
Though I’ve had better luck with the troubleshooters in Windows 10 and 11 than I did with Windows XP, I’ve still found that they fail to resolve an issue way more often than not.
How to Fix an “An Error Occurred While Troubleshooting” Error on Windows 11 or 10
How do you troubleshoot a troubleshooter?
That is their major problem: They attempt to do everything behind the scenes, and very little information is provided to the user.
Sysinternals takes the exact opposite approach, which makes them useful in almost any situation where something has gone wrong, instead of a narrow set of problems that the built-in Windows troubleshooters are capable of handling.
Sysinternals is the swiss army knife of diagnostic suites
Sysinternals tools are designed to expose as much information to you as possible. If you’ve ever wondered why an application is crashing, but you can’t figure out why, Sysinternals has a tool for that. If you’ve ever wondered if that new app you’re trying is sending data to the internet when it shouldn’t be, there is an app for that too.
Instead of trying to fix the problem automatically, they enable you to get the information you need to find a precise solution to your problem.
And, with more than 60 tools available, there is one for nearly every occasion. Here are a few of the ones I use regularly.
Process Explorer: Everything Task Manager wishes it could be
Process Explorer is one of my favorite applications from the Sysinternals suite, and probably the one I use the most.
In many ways, it is like Task Manger. It shows you the applications running on your PC, what kind of system resources they’re using, and where you can find the executable.
However, it also shows you much more than that. If you hover over an application, you’ll see any specific flags that were used to launch it.
If you double-click an application, you can get an incredible amount of detail on almost anything you’d want to know.
It is my go-to application whenever I notice something unusual running on my PC, especially since you can directly submit things to VirusTotal from within the program.
Autorun: No more weird startup apps
Normally, managing your startup apps in Windows is a bit of a pain. You’re supposed to be able to do it from within the Task Manager in Windows 11, but my experience has taught me that there will often be apps that slip through the cracks. Additionally, those are only startup apps. There are plenty of services that start automatically that can only be controlled through the Service utility.
Autoruns from Sysinternals brings together almost all of your automatic startup apps and services into one convenient place, which makes disabling that annoying app that much easier.
Process Monitor: Something breaking?
If you’re lucky, when an app malfunctions, you’ll get a log file clearly indicating what went wrong. More often than not, however, you don’t—you’re stuck trying to work it out yourself. Process Monitor allows you to keep tabs on exactly what a program is doing while it runs. If it is experiencing a bug that results in a crash or freeze, what you see in Process Monitor may help you figure out what the problem is.
Download Sysinternals before you need them
Sysinternals are great—if you have them when you need them. Because they’re portable apps that don’t need to be installed, I always carry them on an external SSD. That way I always have access to them, even if I’m working on a PC that can’t connect to the internet for one reason or another.
If Sysinternals doesn’t have the tool you need, I’d also recommend checking out Nirsoft’s options. Just like Sysinternals, they’re portable, safe, and there is one for nearly every occasion. They’re also portable, which means they can be left on a flash drive for those times when you can’t get on the internet.
