Utility Updates

Quick linkfest running down some old tools updated and new tools discovered.

Autoruns v11.21: This update to Autoruns fixes a number of minor bugs, including one that could result in a crash when certain scheduled tasks are configured. Microsoft Sysinternals.

Process Explorer v15.12: This update to Process Explorer makes the search dialog asynchronous and reports the types of found items. It also fixes several bugs, including showing a small font when run after an older version, a bug in the restart-process functionality, working set columns not showing data, and again shows information about service processes when run from an unprivileged user account. Microsoft Sysinternals.

Strings v2.42: This Strings release fixes a bug that would result in a crash when the –n or -b options are specified without a file name. Microsoft Sysinternals.

Mark’s Blog: Case of the Installer Service Error: Follow along with Mark in another of his popular ‘Case of the Unexplained’ troubleshooting examples where he retraces the steps of a network administrator that used Process Monitor to figure out why the Windows Intune installer failed on one of his systems and goes on to fix the problem.

Mark’s Blog: The Case of My Mom’s Broken Microsoft Security Essentials Installation: Mark goes deep with the Sysinternals tools to fix a corrupt installation of MSE on his mom’s PC over the holidays.

CSVed 2.2.1 - Now at 2.2.1 version.  See also NirSoft’s CSVFileView

CCleaner v3.14 - Piriform - System cleaner

Recuva v1.42 - Piriform - File recovery tool

Speccy v1.14 - Piriform - System information collector

CCEnhancer - v 2.5 - SingularLabs - plugin for CCleaner adding support for over 500 additional aps.

JavaRa - v 1.16 - SingularLabs - not updated but great tool to remove old/redundant versions of JRE.  Now under development is JavaRa 2.0 alpha build which includes updating, removal and some additional bells-n-whistles.

Wecode.biz: Alternative Flash Player Auto-Updater - interesting tool to help update Adobe Flash Player. The latest builds of Flash Player do have an auto-updating feature baked in but it doesn’t (to me) seem to fire off and find newer builds as quickly as I would like to see. This is an alternative that might work good on friends and family PC’s.

ISC Diary | Newest Adobe Flash 11.1.102.55 and Previous 0 Day Exploit -Why keeping Flash updated is important…as if we didn’t need a reminder.

Crystal Dew World - lots of updates here including CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark

WinCrashReport - Displays a report about crashed Windows application - New NirSoft tool. See also this post by Nir Softer himself : New crash reporting utility for Windows

PST Viewer - Free tool to open and view content of PST files without Ms Outlook - Kernel Data Recovery. See also this review: Gave up Microsoft Outlook but need your PST file? There's an app for that - BetaNews. I like this tool in that when I recently had to carve the PST files off a nuked HDD to recover an end-users PST files, I got a ton of them. Rather than mounting each one to a working Outlook client profile, I just fired up this tool to inspect them with the user to find out which ones we wanted to attach and which ones were duplicates. Saved a boat-load of time. Could be good for incident responders as well.

Highlighter v1.1.3 Released - Mandiant M-unition blog notice. Download link

Download Batch Compiler - SourceForge - You need to install on a system (not portable) but still could be a great resource for building more complex batch files. See more info here at AddictiveTips: Batch Compiler: Create Batch Scripts & Convert Them To EXE Format

Splashtop Remote Desktop - interesting new tool for remote connection management. See this Splashtop Is A Better Alternative To Windows RDP at Windows7hacker blog.

Windows Live Writer Backup - Codeplex project page - See this Windows Live Writer Backup post at Windows7hacker blog.

Cheers!

--Claus V.