[altano]

Use https://live.sysinternals.com to quickly grab one of these tools with no fuss

Process Monitor (ProcMon) is one of the best diagnostic tools on the planet. I’ve used it to find why my machine booted slowly (encrypted font?!), what sort of network activity is holding up an app, why my USB device was sucking at wake-from-sleep, etc.

Process Explorer (ProcExp) is amazing at inspecting processes, eg to see their environment variables, see what process integrity levels look like, find out what process has what path open (eg since Windows won’t let you delete open files), etc. It’s a good complement to Task Manager.

TCPView is great for some weird cases. I used it once to find a bad web server as I could see my http requests were failing when the load balancer sent me to a specific IP. This impressed my web developer friends who weren’t used to seeing really accessible but low level diagnostic tools.

All the memory tools are great too.