![]() ![]() I have the same problem that Bruce and K.reg Cees have had above – constant red led, constant disk activity, no respose from mouse, Task Manager, not able to gain control of any processes or programs. Process Explorer is a free download from Microsoft. There’s a wealth of information available. Even if you don’t have a problem to investigate, Process Explorer is worth downloading and … well … exploring. You’ll find that in many Ask Leo! answers one of the first steps I mention is to “download and run process explorer” because it’s just that useful. ![]() Explore the various tabs on the dialog and you’ll be able to see its network usage, security attributes, the resource usage of the process, the command line used to initiate the process and even anything that looks like a readable string within the process image or memory space.Īnd even with everything I’ve just touched on, I’ve really only scratched the surface. Right click on any process and click on Properties for more details:Īs you can see this view on a process, onedrive.exe in this case, shows a lot of additional information. ![]() Process Explorer also lets you dive into individual processes for more information as well. Enter in a partial filename, and procexp will list all the processes that are referencing a handle (typically a file) that includes that name. The Find function is a quick way to see, for example, what process happens to be using a file. As you might expect, this is perhaps the next most common use: to answer the question “ who’s eating up all my memory?” (The “Virtual Size” column does the same but includes virtual memory – memory that may have been swapped to the system paging file and might not actually be physically in use.) This is perhaps the single most common use of procexp: to answer the question “ who’s eating up all my CPU“?Ĭlick on the “Working Set” column header and processes will be listed in order of physical memory used. The “hierarchical” view (click on the “Process” column header to change the view from alphabetical to hierarchical) shows which tasks were started by which other tasks, which can be a very interesting way to understand just how all these processes relate to each other.Ĭlick on the “ CPU” column header and the processes will be listed in order of who’s using the processor the most. Unlike Task Manager, the list is complete and includes all tasks running on your system. When you fire it up,you’ll get exactly what you might expect which is a list of the processes running on your machine: It’s difficult to begin to enumerate the types of things you can do with Process Explorer it’s like a swiss-army knife of system utilities it has many, many potential uses. Process Explorer – or frequently just “procexp” – provides a window into the world of all the programs running on your computer, and offers up a level of detailed information that Task Manager could never hope to approach. Let’s face it, for most computer users you shouldn’t have to. Computers are supposed to “just work”, and you should never need to be bothered with things like processes or resource utilization or what not. Now, you may not need or even want to know what’s going on under the hood. Not only do I find that I refer to it that often, but I’m just the kind of person who likes to know what’s going on inside his computer. It runs automatically whenever I boot up. And part of the reason I say that is because I actually have Process Explorer as an auto-start entry on my two primary machines. You can choose from 13 items in Status Bar.OK, I admit it, I’m a geek. You can choose from 24 items in Process Performance. You can choose from 14 items in Process Memory. You can choose from 14 items in Process Image. You can choose any of 25 items here for display. The complement of 52 items selectable there is comparable to the complement of 25 items selectable for Task Manager. There are 3 Process (Image, Memory, and Performance) tabs. SysInternals (now another division of Microsoft, but that's another story) gives us Process Explorer, which lets us choose, in a tabbed menu This is the original tool that you might use, in watching what your computer is doing. Task Manager lets us choose a total of 25 items that we can learn about each process. Microsoft gives us Task Manager, to track the processes. Keeping track of all of the processes running, at any time, is a major activity. Other processes are started by the system - we call them services. Some processes we start intentionally - we call them applications or programs. ![]() Microsoft Windows gives us the ability to run multiple processes simultaneously - it's called multitasking. ![]()
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