Diagnostics

Network Diagnostics

  • Uptime Robot
  • Speedtest.net by Ookla
  • AWS Service Health Dashboard
  • IPLeak.net – IP/DNS Detect – What is your IP, DNS, information sent to Websites.
  • NetWorx is a powerful tool to evaluate your bandwidth consumption. You can use it to collect bandwidth usage data, and measure the speed of your Internet or any other network connections.
    • NetWorx can help you identify possible sources of network problems, ensure that you do not exceed the bandwidth limits specified by your ISP, or track down suspicious network activity characteristic of Trojan horses and hacker attacks.
    • Right-click on the icon in the notification area, then Tools > Connection Monitor
      • In Connection Monitor, enable “Ping the above hosts periodically…”

System Diagnostics

Process Monitor by SysInternals

  • Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free.

Drive Diagnostics

SpinRite by Steve Gibson ( grc.com )

  • Hard drive data recovery and maintenance
  • I recommend that you run SpinRite on:
    • all your hard drives on a regular basis.
    • new hard drives before putting them into production.
  • SpinRite v6.0 may stop responding to USB keyboard input on some systems.
    • My experience is that the USB keyboard input stops working properly after SpinRite has been running for a while. This is more than enough time to select the drives or partitions and the operation level.
    • Some have said that plugging the USB keyboard in the port under the Ethernet port works. That has not been my experience.
  • Issue: SpinRite v6.0 crashes on drives/partitions that are over 500GB. I’ve had no luck with any drives 1TB or larger, on at least a dozen different PC’s. All were updated with the latest BIOS available at the time. As suggested by SpinRite support I tried different settings in the BIOS, AHCI vs Legacy, etc., with no success. For now SpinRite v6.0 is useless to me because most of my drives are 1TB or larger. Hopefully SpinRite v6.1, which is seriously delayed, will resolve this failure.
  • Beware: It’s confirmed that some malware/viruses/trojans have been named SpinRite.exe. You’ve been warned. You should purchase a legit copy directly from grc.com to be safe and to support the author.

Malware Cleanup

Live AntiVirus and Recovery Discs (archive)

  • Links to free ISO files that you can use to create bootable discs that can clean an infected Windows system.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

  • Detects and removes malware that even the most well known anti-virus and anti-malware applications fail to detect.
  • A free version is available.

Spybot – Search & Destroy

  • Searches your hard drive for so-called spy- or adbots; little modules that are responsible for the ads many programs display. But many of these modules also transmit information about your surfing behaviour and more to the net.