Windows Task Manager, which you can launch either by clicking CTRL+ALT+DEL or by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, is mildly useful, but it’s not exactly a power user’s tool. Process Explorer is exponentially more advanced and sort of picks up where Task Manager lags.

Process Explorer shows detailed information about any given process. A process is part of all of a computer program that’s being executed by the computer’s central processing unit (CPU). Windows, a multitasking operating system, can execute a bunch of processes at once, and the OS takes advantage of this by cramming itself full of processes, some of which are indicated in different ways in the user interface.

Some processes leave icons in the system tray. Others you can find by running Task Manager. If you snoop in enough places, you’ll find most of the processes running in your Windows system right now. Or you can just use Process Explorer and it’ll show you a list.

Process Explorer sheds light on every process that’s running in Windows (it works on Windows 98 and later versions).

It not only shows you the processes running on the system, but also all kinds of useful information—everything from its icon and its full path to its command line (including any arguments), memory and CPU stats, attributes, DLLs it might be using, and a whole lot more.

You can launch Process Explorer with its own command line switches:

  1. Open a DOS prompt or a command line window however your version of Windows lets you.
  2. Navigate to the Process Explorer folder.
  3. Type the name of the executable (by default it’s procexp) and then any of the following switches:
    • /e—This prompts for User Account Control administrative rights, if the program was launched without them.
    • /s—Process Explorer automatically selects the process with the ID you enter here.
    • /t—This starts Process Explorer minimized with only a tray icon.
    • /p[r, h, n, or l]—This sets Process Explorer’s priority to real time, high, normal or low, respectively.

You can use Process Explorer for just about anything related to Windows processes. You can find processes that have hung or are being held open (even, perhaps, when somebody’s trying to close it) by other processes.

It can identify which processes need a currently loaded DLL—if any—enabling you to free memory or even clock cycles by shutting it down.

It can show a process that is choking off the CPU, stealing all its cycles and causing a terrible performance, and unlike Task Manager it can show which thread in the process is the guilty party. Continued…