Sunday, August 21, 2011

NirSoft Utility Births and Growing Spurts

Nir Sofer continues to provide some of the best Windows system support and administration utilities, freely, that are available over at his NirSoft website. Period.

In my humble opinion, only Mark Russinovich’s Microsoft Sysinternals tools offer the width and breadth of must-have system utilitarianism as Nir’s.  And those is mighty big boots to be standing alongside.

So it should come to no surprise that Nir’s prolific coding power hasn’t been resting with a whole slew of new and cool system utilities (all standalone) along with nice updates to some previously released goodies.

I submit to you tonight for your most geeky downloading:

BatteryInfoView -- More into at NirBlog Post New utility that displays battery information on laptops and netbooks

Wireless Network Watcher-- More into at NirBlog Post New utility that shows who is connected to your wireless network.

I really, really like this one.  With a few clicks, you can discover and monitor which devices are making wireless connections and keep an eye out for unwanted/unauthorized connections to a large degree. (Alvis…I know you haven’t gone to bed yet! Why is your laptop still on?)

CustomExplorerToolbar-- More into at NirBlog Post New utility to customize the Explorer toolbar of Windows 7

ProcessThreadsView -- More into at NirBlog Post New utility that shows information about all threads in a process, and this BetaNews post Find out what's really happening on your PC with ProcessThreadsView.  I see it as a very useful companion to both ProcessActivityView from NirSoft and Process Explorer from Sysinternals.

TableTextCompare-- More into at NirBlog Post New utility to compare comma-delimited (csv) or tab-delimited files created by other Nirsoft tools

DomainHostingView-- More into at NirBlog Post New utility that shows the hosting/owner information of a domain. I’ve already done a few URL studies on suspcious/spam/phishing links. It aggregates a lot of information quickly and provide wonderfully useful information.

WakeMeOnLan-- More into at NirBlog Post New utility that turns on computers on your network with Wake-on-LAN packet.  I like it’s enumeration of active devices including IP, Name, MAC, and various other details. Nice one-stop shopping, even if you don’t use it for managing WOL packet sends. Very similar to Nir’s FastResolver network discovery tool but with the added WOL capability.

Keeping up with latest and greatest offerings from Nir certainly can be daunting

Luckily you can subscribe to his Update/Announcements syndication feed link: NirSoft - Freeware Utilities as I do.

You may also want to add the syndication feed link of his NirBlog page which provided some more in-depth software tool background and musings.

There have been quite a few updates as well to existing tools. Of note to me for enhanced usage in incident-response or administration use were:

DevManView v1.23 - Update was as noted on the page “…added a second Device Registry Time value, which usually displays the installation time of the device.”

USBDeview v1.92- Recent updates up to and including this version release as noted on the page include:

“Added 'Turn Off Device On Disable/Remove' option, only for Windows 7/2008/Vista. As opposed to Windows XP, Windows 7/2008/Vista doesn't turn off the USB device when you disable or 'Safely Remove' the device. This new option make a small Registry change to make Windows 7/2008/Vista behave like Windows XP and turn off the device after disable or 'Safely Remove' action. For more information: USB Port Remains Active for Disabled or Safely Removed USB Device.  Be aware that this change takes effect only after reboot, and requires full admin rights (execute USBDeview.exe with 'Run As Administrator')

“For USB To Serial devices, USBDeview now displays the port name (Com1, Com2, Com3,...), if it's stored in the Registry. The port name is displayed on the 'Drive Letter' column.

“Improved the detection of the 'Last Plug/Unplug Date' value.“

OpenedFilesView v1.52- Update was as noted on the page “…Added 'Open File Folder' option (F8), which opens the folder of selected file in Windows Explorer.“

SmartSniff v1.80 - Update was as noted on the page “…Added 'Extract HTTP Files' option (under the File menu), which allows you to easily extract all HTTP files stored in the selected streams, into the folder that you choose.”

Now go forth and download!

--Claus V.

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