Windows Sysinternals is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...

that offers technical resources and utilities to manage, diagnose, troubleshoot, and monitor a

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

environment. Originally, the Sysinternals website (formerly known as ntinternals) was created in 1996 and was operated by the company Winternals Software LP, which was located in

Austin, Texas Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...

. It was started by

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

s Bryce Cogswell and

Mark Russinovich Mark Eugene Russinovich (born December 22, 1966) is a Spanish-born American software engineer and author who serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before Microsoft acquired it in 2006. Early lif ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

acquired Winternals and its assets on July 18, 2006. The website featured several

freeware Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...

tools to administer and monitor computers running Microsoft Windows. The software can now be found at Microsoft. The company also sold

data recovery In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, overwritten or formatted data from computer data storage#Secondary storage, secondary storage, removable media or Computer file, files, when ...

utilities and professional editions of their freeware tools.

Winternals Software LP

Winternals Software LP was founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who sparked the

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in an October 2005 posting to the Sysinternals blog. On July 18, 2006, Microsoft Corporation acquired the company and its assets. Russinovich explained that Sysinternals will remain active until Microsoft agrees on a method of distributing the tools provided there. However, NT Locksmith, a Windows

password recovery In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of guessing passwords protecting a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly try guesses for the password and to check them against an availab ...

utility, was immediately removed. Most of the source that Sysinternals provided was also removed. Currently, the Sysinternals website is moved to the ''Windows Sysinternals'' website and is a part of

Microsoft Docs Microsoft Docs was a library of technical documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals who work with Microsoft products. The Microsoft Docs website provided technical specifications, conceptual articles, tutorials, guides, API ...

. In late 2010, Cogswell retired from Sysinternals.

Products

Windows Sysinternals supplies users with numerous free utilities, most of which are being actively developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, such as

Process Explorer Process Explorer is a freeware task manager and system monitor for Microsoft Windows created by SysInternals, which has been acquired by Microsoft and re-branded as Windows Sysinternals. It provides the functionality of Windows Task Manager alo ...

, an advanced version of

Windows Task Manager Task Manager, previously known as Windows Task Manager, is a task manager, system monitor, and startup manager included with Microsoft Windows systems. It provides information about computer performance and running software, including names of ...

, Autoruns, which Windows Sysinternals claims is the most advanced manager of startup applications,

RootkitRevealer RootkitRevealer is a proprietary freeware tool for rootkit detection on Microsoft Windows by Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich. It runs on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (32-bit-versions only). Its output lists Windows Registry and file sys ...

, a

rootkit A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) and often masks its existence or the exist ...

detection utility,

Contig A contig (from ''contiguous'') is a set of overlapping DNA segments that together represent a consensus region of DNA.Gregory, S. ''Contig Assembly''. Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, 2005. In bottom-up sequencing projects, a contig refers to over ...

, PageDefrag and a total of 65 other utilities.

NTFSDOS NTFSDOS were three kinds of programs by Winternals (later bought by Microsoft) for DOS that could handle NTFS formatted drives. Programs Basic The first program was NTFSDOS - a freeware utility for DOS (''NTFSDOS.EXE'') that allows read- ...

, which allowed NTFS volumes to be read by Microsoft's

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

operating system, is now discontinued and is no longer available for download. A larger number of these utilities are nowadays bundled by the publishers for the sake of simpler downloading of all, or most, current versions in the so-called Sysinternals Suite. Previously available for download was the Winternals Administrator Pak which contained ERD Commander 2005, Remote Recover 3.0, NTFSDOS Professional 5.0, Crash Analyzer Wizard, FileRestore 1.0, Filemon Enterprise Edition 2.0, Regmon Enterprise Edition 2.0, AD Explorer Insight for Active Directory 2.0, and TCP Tools. On May 18, 2010, Sysinternals released its first new utility since its acquisition by Microsoft. Named RAMMap, it is a diagnostic utility similar to the memory tab of Windows Resource monitor, but more advanced. RAMMap runs only on Windows Vista and later. A system event monitoring tool, Sysmon, was released in 2014, which can collect and publish system events that are helpful for security analysis into the Windows Event Log. In November 2018, Microsoft confirmed it is

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desig ...

Sysinternals tools, including

ProcDump ProcDump is a command-line application used for monitoring an application for CPU spikes and creating crash dumps during a spike. The crash dumps can then be used by an administrator or software developer to determine the cause of the spike. Proc ...

and ProcMon, to

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Licensing issue with Best Buy

In April 2006,

Geek Squad Geek Squad, Inc. is a subsidiary of American and Canadian multinational consumer electronics corporation Best Buy, headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. The subsidiary was originally an independent company founded by "Chief Inspector" Robert Ste ...

, a tech support company working in cooperation with

Best Buy Best Buy Co., Inc. is an American multinational consumer electronics retailer headquartered in Richfield, Minnesota. Originally founded by Richard M. Schulze and James Wheeler in 1966 as an audio specialty store called Sound of Music, it was r ...

, was accused of using unlicensed versions of the ERD Commander software. Winternals supplied Best Buy with copies of its software so that Best Buy could evaluate the software while conducting contract negotiations for using it on a permanent basis. When contract talks broke down Best Buy did not notify its Geek Squad Agents to stop using the software and discard all copies. A judge granted a restraining order on April 14, requiring that use of all unlicensed software be stopped, and forcing Best Buy to turn over all copies of Winternals software within 20 days. After settlement, a version of the Winternals software was released to be used by Geek Squad.Winternals & Best Buy/Geek Squad Settle Federal Lawsuit
, Winternals press release. Retrieved on December 16, 2006.

References

External links

Sysinternals page on Microsoft Docs
*
Sysinternals Live tools directory
– Directly accessible repository of utilities
Winternals homepage
�� Redirected to Microsoft

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search for "winternals" ** {{Use mdy dates, date=July 2011 Computing websites Companies based in Austin, Texas Data recovery software Defunct software companies of the United States Internet properties established in 1996 Microsoft free software Microsoft subsidiaries Software companies based in Texas Technology companies established in 1996

Winternals Software LP

Products

Licensing issue with Best Buy

See also

References

External links