Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy, has a good article on TechNet about automatically keeping your local SysInternals files up-to-date.  If you use the SysInternals tools, you know that they are updated fairly frequently – often due to suggestions from outside Microsoft.  If you aren’t using SysInternals, well, you should start.

Scripting Guy’s article is a bit long-winded (in a Spencer F. Katt way), so here’s the quick and dirty for getting started.

1. Copy the Powershell script, Get-Sysinternals.ps1, from the TechNet Gallery
2. Paste the script into your favorite editor and save it to the location where you keep scripts (e.g., %UserProfile%/Scripts)
3. Open Powershell or Powershell ISE as admin (otherwise the script provides a warning: This script requires running as an elevated administrator
4. Before running the script, make sure you know exactly where SysInternals tools are stored (e.g., %ProgramFiles(x86)%/SysInternals).  You’ll provide this path when you run get-sysinternals.ps1.  If you don’t provide a path, the script will put the SysInternals tools in %SystemRoot%/SysInternals.  Call me paranoid, but I don’t like making changes within %SystemRoot% if it can be avoided.
5. Run the script.  For example, I run the script like this:

Get-SysInternals “${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}/SysInternals”

Don’t forget the curly braces, or you’ll end up with a path like C:\Program Files(x86)\SysInternals (note the missing space b/t Files and (x86))

Here’s a screenshot of the output on my machine:

Worth noting:

• Colorized output is a very nice touch!
• New apps / utilities are reported in green
• Updated apps / utilities are reported in yellow
• Unchanged apps / utilities are reported in white
• The script appears to re-write your machine’s path environment in a different order!  (See the Old Path and New Path sections of the screenshot above) I wasn’t expecting that, and I’m not sure I like it.  That’s a pretty aggressive move.

I’m pretty satisfied with manually executing this script occasionally.  Automating it, I have to admit, is pretty cool, however.  So, if you want to automate the script, check out Scripting Guy’s article.

Now, if we just had a way of keeping Get-Sysinternals.ps1 up-to-date.