I think though that the MPSA tool for your own individual machine is cool to use because is shows many things and attempts to explain why you should do such and oftens gives the links to files or KB for doing such and HFSNETCHK does not go that far. If however you had a normal user run this MPSA tool and perform everything that it recommends, you would probably be paying a visit to the machine to repair the functionality of the system. Many suggestions are more applicable to a home machine then a business machine connected to a LAN/WAN.

As far as how secure is the information? I can not vouch for them, but it does not appear to send data back to M$. (your mileage may vary).

NOTE:
The current release version of the HFNETCHK tool is broken for most companies using firewalls, etc... Microsoft has a HFNetChk 3.2 Release Candidate beta that fixes the problems which prevent you from remotely scanning a system. It was working in 3.1x and they broke it in an updated version. The next version is supposed to be 3.3 I think and it should have some new functionality/and repairs.

Great tool for at least keeping on top of Servers. Nothing is automated, so how useful it is for trying to keep Workstations up to date is up to interpretation. For myself, trying to manually update and do multiple reboots on 1,000+ workstations is not very manageable. This would be much more of a job for SMS or other similar tools. (unless Bill gets his code completed and it works good, then I might be swayed to give it a try - That kind of coding is too
ambitious for me though)

[ 23 October 2001: Message edited by: NTDOC ]