Following on from my previous post on crash dumps and the Tech-Ed presentation I thought it was worth quickly pointing out the tools I use on a daily basis:

Process Explorer

Taskmanager on steriods - see what services and threads are running - look at the real list of processes that take up cpu time rather than how Windows Task Manager does the trick

FileMon

Ever wonder what folder that temp file was put in, or what file is being looked for when something fails - this is hwo to find it

RegMon

Like Filemon, but for the registry - find out what si being read, written too, searched for etc.

PendMoves

Can't install something because the system has a number of pending "moves" - files it will rename on reboot - find out what they are and then you can do something about it if you want

DiskMon

See what activity is happening on your disk

ttfn

David