Windows Sysinternals is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

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

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

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 capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

. It was started by

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, Computer programming, programming, software documentation, documenting, software testing, testing, and Software bugs, bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applic ...

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 it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Ea ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

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

freeware Freeware is software, most 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 f ...

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, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The da ...

utilities and professional editions of their freeware tools.

Winternals Software LP

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

2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management ...

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 recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system in scrambled form. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to repeatedly tr ...

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. In late 2010, Bryce 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 along ...

, 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 name of r ...

, 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 sy ...

, 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 exis ...

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 ov ...

PageDefrag PageDefrag is a program, developed by Sysinternals (now distributed by Microsoft), for Microsoft Windows that runs at start-up to defragment the virtual memory page file, the registry files and the Event Viewer's logs (files such as AppEvent.Evt, ...

and a total of 65 other utilities.

NTFSDOS The company Winternals (later purchased by Microsoft) used to provide three kinds of programs for DOS that could handle NTFS formatted drives. The NTFSDOS programs NTFSDOS The first program was NTFSDOS - a freeware utility for DOS (''NTFSD ...

, 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 ope ...

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 desi ...

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. ProcD ...

and ProcMon, to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

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 Step ...

, 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 rebra ...

, 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" *
Web Archive.org link to historical information Winternals
{{Use mdy dates, date=July 2011 Computing websites Internet properties established in 1996 Software companies based in Texas Companies based in Austin, Texas Microsoft subsidiaries Technology companies established in 1996 Software companies of the United States

Winternals Software LP

Products

Licensing issue with Best Buy

See also

References

External links