A few years ago Microsoft bought a company called Sysinternals that makes some of the most useful free utilities for Windows. This week the company launched Sysinternals Live, a single webpage with a huge list of Sysinternals utilities. The site isn't much to look at, but it's a one-stop shop for the latest version of any Sysinternals utilty. If you want to make sure you're always using the most recent version of a Sysinternals app, you can just grab it from the Live page without digging through a bunch of product pages to find it.

Here are a few of our favorite Sysinternals apps:

Process Explorer - This is a replacement for the Windows Task Explorer that gives you detailed information about your CPU and RAM usage as well as running processes.

Autoruns - This utility lets you easily manage the programs and processes that launch every time Windows starts.

Contig - This is a powerful command-line disk defragmenter.

You can access these programs by typing \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\contig.exe or autoruns.exe or procexp.exe into your Windows Explorer. You can run programs this way even if you haven't previously downloaded and installed them. Or if you just want easy access to the installers, you can also use http://live.sysinternals.com/contig.exe.

If you know the name of the utility you want, you can create a browser bookmark that will always link to the latest version.

[via ZDNet]