If you are a tech who works on Windows computers then chances are the name Sysinternals is one that you are very familar with as is the name of the man behind it - Mark Russinovich. Sysinternals is well known for writing some of the best software around when it comes to dealing with Windows to the point that the company was bought up by Microsoft in 2006. There was a big hue and cry at the time as diehard fans of the software felt that Microsoft would ruin the products.

In this case however it was pretty well much the opposite as  the software has been consistently been improved on and is still free for everyone to use; and today it got even better. As reported by Ed Bott on his ZDNet blog all the Sysinternals software is also available via a new service called Sysinternals Live.

The new service enables you to execute the most recent version of any Sysinternals tool directly from an Internet-connected PC, without having to hunt for the executable file and manually download it first. To access the complete library of tools, use either of these methods from a Windows-based PC:

• Go to the Sysinternals Live directory (http://live.sysinternals.com) and click the name of the tool you want to run. Because the directory listing is a bare-bones HTML file, it can be used in any browser.
• If you know the name of the executable file for the tool you want to use, enter it directly, using the syntax \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname>, where <toolname> is the name of the executable file. (Note the UNC syntax uses backslashes, not slashes, as in a URL. Start with a pair of backslashes to indicate that live.sysinternals.com is the remote server, and don’t include the angle brackets with the tool name.)

Right now the service is available only through a plain HTML directory listing so as Ed says you will need to know the name of the program you want to run. I tried it out myself with a few of the programs and when you click on the *.exe of any of the programs you want you will get the typical Run or Save File  dialog window popup. Just select the Run button and then once more from the second dialog (Security Warning dialog) window and you are good to go as the selected program will be started up for you at that point.

For tech’s working out in the field on customer machine this is going to be a real big help and it’s nice to see that Microsoft is holding true to its promise to always make these excellent tools available for everyone to use free of charge - and in so many ways.

Conversation Tags: Microsoft, Sysinternals, tech professionals