The project debuted by Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell continues to evolve in Redmond, with an update version of the suite now available for download. On November 3rd, 2009, the Redmond company refreshed various components of the Windows Sysinternals suite, all of which were immediately available for download. Specifically, the following tools were updated: Disk2vhd v1.3, Sigcheck v1.61, Process Monitor v2.8, and LiveKd v3.12. Disk2vhd v1.0 was introduced in the first half of October 2009 as a way to streamline the migration of physical systems into virtual machines, according to Microsoft. Since the initial release, this specific Windows Sysinternals component has been updated four times.

“Disk2vhd v1.3: This update to Disk2vhd makes more Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 VHDs bootable by updating their MBR and boot sectors to be compatible with Hyper-V and Virtual PC and by installing the Intelide driver if it it’s not already installed. It also optimizes image creation by not copying paging and hibernation files,” explained Curtis Metz, program manager, Microsoft Sysinternals. “Sigcheck v1.62: This update to Sigcheck, a utility that displays file version and digital signature information, removes a file size limit for generating file hashes, works on 64-bit MSI files, and reports expired signatures.”

A notable change with the latest refresh of the Windows Sysinternals suite is the fact that Microsoft has killed NewSID. Designed in 1997, NewSID was meant to alter the machine Security Identifier (machine SID) of computers. “The reason that I began considering NewSID for retirement is that, although people generally reported success with it on Windows Vista, I hadn’t fully tested it myself and I got occasional reports that some Windows component would fail after NewSID was used,” Russinovich explained.

Another modification worth mentioning is related to Coreinfo, which, almost a month ago, evolved to version 2.0. According to Microsoft, the updated Coreinfo component is designed to deliver support for IA64 processors. The company also noted that the utility could now play nice with Windows Server 2008 R2 systems running on servers with more than 64 logical processors.

“Process Monitor v2.8: Displays new Windows 7 CreateFile options, includes file-delete operations in the Category filter’s Write subcategory, and displays names for more IOCTLs and result codes. LiveKd v3.12: This release fixes compatibility with 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server 2003,” Metz added.

Windows Sysinternals is available for download here.