15.4 Getting a Better View of Processes on Your System with Process Explorer

Sometimes you need to get a good view of how processes are behaving on your system. Task Manager gives only rudimentary information and isn’t at all helpful if you’re trying to find out what resources (e.g., DLLs or handles) a process is using. Worse yet, Task Manager doesn’t help you find out which processes belong to which applications when you have multiple instances running.

Sysinternals, creator of a huge number of excellent freeware tools, offers Process Explorer as a great resource for developers in need of more information about processes on their systems.

Process Explorer at a Glance

Tool

Process Explorer

Version covered

10.06

Home page

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Power Tools page

http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/73

Summary

Great tool for getting details on processes, the resources they use, and system performance

License type

Freeware; can’t be redistributed without specific permission, can’t use for customer support (see web site for details)

Online resources

Forum

Related tools in this book

Filemon, TCPView, Regmon

Getting Started

Three different downloads are available, supporting Win9x/ME, 32-bit versions of NT/XP/2000/Server 2003, and 64-bit versions of XP/Server 2003. Installing Process Explorer couldn’t be simpler: simply unpack the .zip file into a folder and run it.

You ...

Get Windows Developer Power Tools now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.