Process Explorer is a process monitoring software originally created by Mark Russinovich. His company, Sysinternals, has always been known to make great softwares to monitor the internal details of a system. Lots of system utilities are available at SysInternals.com . Later, the company was taken over by Microsoft making it part of Microsoft TechNet. I have been a long time user of this software and must admit that it is quiet powerful. If, like me, you love to keep trying out software and keep lots of software running at time, you should install Process Explorer. What distinguishes it from Window's Task Manager is that it can show process in hierarchical order of opening and show icons of the process running.
Process Information
Apart from the hierarchical display and icons, it provides lots of extra information. The Description and Company Name of the running process is available in the main screen itself. If you want a much detailed view of the process, simply choose View->Show Lower Pane. This should bring up the detailed pane containing the DLLs accessed by the process and the Handles (File, Directory, Registry, Port, Thread, etc.) open by the process.
Well, the above mentioned information are just a fraction of the information available. To get a more detailed info about the process, simply double-click or right-click and choose Properties.
The Process Properties page has lots of Tabs:
- The default tab (which is Image tab) contains basic information such as the EXE file associated with the process, Command Line Parameters, User running the process, Parent ID, Started time etc.
- The Performance tab contains various Performance figures related to CPU (Priority, Kernel Time etc.), Virtual Memory (Private Bytes, Virtual Size etc.), Physical Memory (Memory Priority, Working Set etc.), I/O (I/O Priority, Reads etc.), and Handles.
- Performance Graph page contains graph related to the Process CPU Usage, Private Bytes History (Usually RAM access) and I/O Bytes History (Usually Hard Disk access).
- The Threads tab shows a list of tab associated with the process and details about the thread. You also have the option to suspend or kill a thread (Be careful, if you suspend or kill an important thread of the process, the program may become very unstable).
- TCP/IP tab lists all the Ports opened by the process and all the active connections.
- Security tab contains information regarding which users have what privilege on the process.
- The Environment tab lists all the environment variables that was set when the process was started.
Search Function
A search option is available to search all open processes and corresponding DLLs or Handles for a specific string. This can come in very handy if you find difficult to delete a file. If you are not able to delete a DLL or EXE, it means that the process is locked in use by some other process. The search feature helps you find which process is locking the process.
Users Menu
A simple menu showing all the Users logged into the system. On Windows Server systems, this can come in handy as several people might have connected to the system using Terminal Clients. For each User, a corresponding menu contains option to Disconnect, Log Off, Send Message, and View Properties.
Finally....
There are lots of other features available too. For example, like other process monitoring software, you can kill process. But unlike others, it also has option to kill Process Tree. The option also kills all process created by the selected process and their children hierarchically. You can also Suspend and Resume process. Finally, form the Options menu you can choose Replace Task Manager to completely replace the Windows Task Manager with Process Explorer.
I hope you have a good time with this software. See you next time...
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