Brightrev

Microsoft's Windows Sysinternals group writes a bunch of great utilities for finding out what's going on with Windows systems.  This article covers five useful functions of one the Sysinternals utilities, Task Manager-like application Process Explorer.

Before we start, you'll need to download Process Explorer from Microsoft and extract it to a directory on your PC.  Run the procexp.exe executable to start Process Explorer.

1. Replace Task Manager

Process Explorer does almost everything Task Manager does and a lot of things Task Manager doesn't.  You can replace Task Manager with Process Explorer by clicking Options -> Replace Task Manager.  On Windows Vista you'll need to confirm your choice with a UAC prompt. 

When you open Process Explorer, you'll see a process list similar to the one in Task Manager.  Double-clicking a process name bring up a detailed process information dialog.  Click the graphs in the toolbar to get a Task Manager-style System Information graph that keeps five minutes of data, rather than the one minute graphs in Task Manager.

2. Create custom column views

Process Explorer's columns aren't the same as those in Task Manager, but you can create and save your own column views.  To move columns around, just click the column header and drag it left or right, depending on where you want it.  To add columns, right-click the column headers and click Select Columns...  Once you've chosen the columns you want, click View -> Save Column Set... and give your column view a name.  You can setup multiple column views and switch between them using View -> Load Column Set.

3. Show a system tray CPU and I/O graph

Process Explorer can show CPU and I/O performance graphs in the Windows system tray so they're always visible.  Click Options -> CPU History in tray icon and I/O history in tray icon to enable both graphs.

4. Individual Process graphs

As stated above, double-clicking any of the entries in the process list brings up a Properties dialog that includes detailed information about the process.  With the properties dialog open, click the Performance Graph tab, which shows a visual representation of the CPU, memory and I/O history of that process.

5. Find and search for running processes

Finally, if you're wondering what the heck all these processes are, Process Explorer makes it easy to go right from process name to web search.  When you want to search for a process, right-click it in the list and click Search Online... and Process Explorer will open a browser window with a search for that process name.

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