Sysinternals has announced updates for Autoruns and Process Monitor, as well as the release of a new command line tool, Registry Usage.

The Autoruns tweaks are the most significant. In particular, all reports now include a timestamp for executable files, folders or Registry keys. And so if you browse to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run in the Everything view, say, you’ll now see a timestamp which tells you when that Registry key was last modified.

Of course, while this is a welcome addition, it does highlight one current failing of the program: you can’t simply click a column header to sort entries by date (or any other field). Perhaps that will be next.

New timestamps tell you when system changes were made

Elsewhere, Process Monitor gains support for Windows 8 file information query types, as well as having a minor bug fix in its tooltip handling.

And the new Registry Usage (RU.exe) is a simple command line tool which give you details on the size, value and subkey counts of a specified Registry key.

To try the program out, just open a command line at the folder where it’s located, and launch it with a suitable path (short and long forms are supported: “ru hkey_current_user” or “ru hkcu“, for example). After a pause you’ll see a report listing the number of values and keys within that path, and their total size in bytes.

Other options allow you to itemise subkeys, as well as control the number of levels the program will browse, as well as exporting the details as CSV for easy reference and analysis later.

And, as usual, launching Registry Usage without any command line switches will display information on the program’s various options.