Free Geek Stuff to Diagnose Your PC

Ever wondered why your PC is acting strange? Or maybe you’re connected to the net and your surfing seems to be a pain instead of your usual speed surfing? Maybe your anti spyware tools failed to do its job and there may be several programs or applications running in the background that you might not be aware of and it’s affecting your pc’s performance?

I stumbled upon a couple of free tools to help you check and troubleshoot your pc.

A bit of a warning though, this is basically for geeks and not for the usual pc user. But if you’re a bit knowledgeable on the subject and brave enough to tackle the problem head-on, you can start downloading and installing the following.

Filemon - FileMon gives you a real-time view of every running program–and lets you know what it’s doing. The tool records and timestamps the actions of each open application–say, opening other files or loading helper programs. Watch for a specific program’s behavior just before a system freeze.

Find out what those mysterious processes listed in Task Manager are really up to by using - Process Explorer v11.12 Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

Regmon - Monitor all applications that are accessing your Registry. The Windows Registry is one of the more mysterious parts of your OS. Though the Registry is essential to the way Windows runs, programs alter it in the background, without your knowledge or permission. Regmon sheds some light on the mystery by showing you which applications are accessing your Registry and which keys they are accessing.

It shows you all of the Registry data your programs are reading and writing. And Regmon does all this in real-time: Unlike other tools, which show you after the fact what values and keys have changed, Regmon shows you the changes while they are happening. One thing is certain–after using this tool, you’ll never think of your OS in the same way.

I also use Tea Timer that goes with Spybot Search and Destroy. This utility loads upon boot up. It catches anything that tries to mess with your registry in the background. You are prompted if any application tries to change your registry in real time, either you accept or deny the change. So that takes care of those malicious websites or any application mucking around with your registry.

Download spybot search and destroy here:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,22262-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html

Click on this link for the downloads on Filemon, Process Explorer and Regmon:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collection/collid,1403-order,1-c,downloads/files.html

Here are other utilities you might also be interested in:

Obtaining Disk Information and Managing File Systems with FSUtil

One tool that helps you examine disk information and file system is the File System Utility (FSUtil). Here are a couple of command line examples to examine your disk.

http://book.itzero.com/read/microsoft/Microsoft.Press.Microsoft.Windows.Command-Line.Administrators.Pocket.Consultant.Apr.2004.eBook-DDU_html/8411/DDU0046.html
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491071.aspx

Networking Stuff diagnostic tools:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_key.html
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/using/tools/igd/default.mspx

So if you’re up to the task at hand, be my guest and download the free geek stuff.

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Free Geek Stuff to Diagnose Your PC