 | By Ryan Russell Microsoft’s Process Explorer tool is a convenient way to find in one spot a lot of information about running processes. In the last several months, I’ve covered in this column a lot of commercial and canned tools. Now I’ll show you how to explore on your own. |
Process Explorer: like a microscope into your PC
Microsoft’s free tool, Process Explorer, is highly useful for examining programs running on your Windows computer. This is one of the many great tools Microsoft got when the Redmond company acquired Sysinternals and its main developers. PE works on Windows 9x, NT 4, Windows 2000, and later operating systems, including 64-bit and Itanium versions.
Unlike tools that scan your hard drive — looking for problems, out-of-date files, Startup items, and so on — Process Explorer concerns itself with processes that are currently running in memory.
Figure 1. Process Explorer shows running processes and child processes.
At a glance, PE provides easy-to-view information about each process, such as the executable name, description, process ID, and how much CPU each process is using at the moment. The default sort (by process) shows a tree view, which indicates which process launched other processes. You can right-click any given process and kill it (along with its child processes, if you wish). You can also change a process’s priority or run a Web search for information on it. The latter step is extremely handy for doing research on processes you don’t recognize.
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