Scott Hanselman recently posted an article in which he used PsExec to open regedit running as the System user (think administrator on steroids). This allowed him to delete registry entries that aren’t normally accessible. The cool thing about this tool is the remoting capabilities. I’m about to give it a shot here at work to see if it is quicker than using remote desktop for administering remote servers.

Utilities like Telnet and remote control programs like Symantec's PC Anywhere let you execute programs on remote systems, but they can be a pain to set up and require that you install client software on the remote systems that you wish to access. PsExec is a light-weight telnet-replacement that lets you execute processes on other systems, complete with full interactivity for console applications, without having to manually install client software. PsExec's most powerful uses include launching interactive command-prompts on remote systems and remote-enabling tools like IpConfig that otherwise do not have the ability to show information about remote systems.