Winternals Administrator's Pak 5.0

Winternals is the commercial software firm run by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. It's sister www.sysinternals site, is (or sure should be) well know by Windows power users around the globe as the source of outstanding free utilities. I've lost count of the number of times I've used their tools to really do useful things (e.g. regmon, filemon, bginfo, just to name a few!). Sysinternals takes those free tools to the next level and produce some really great commercial systems management tools.

One of Winternals' tools is the Administrator Pak. The current version 4.2 edition is a great set of tools enabling you to revive unbootable or damaged systems, diagnose problems with Windows, etc. The pack includes ERD Commander 2003, Disk Commander, NTFSDOS Professional, Remote Recover, Monitoring Tools, and TCPView Pro.

Winternals is due to ship Version 5.0 later this month. The new version features improved versions of both ERD Commander and Remote Recover, a centralised navigator, and some new tools including Insight for Active Directory, AD Explorer, and Crash Analyzer Wizard. This later tool uses the standard crash dump tools you can download from MS to help you to diagnose the source of blue screens!

Full product details have not yet been posted to Winternal's site. The current version is licensed on a per administrator basis, enabling each admin to use the tools on an unlimited number of systems. A neat licensing model - here in the UK, the RRP for each license is US$1410/admin (plus US$282/year maintenance). No prices have been disclosed for the new version yet.