Process Explorer

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Process Explorer is another very useful free tool from SysInternals.

It’s pretty much Windows Task Manager on sterroids. It provides a vast amount of information, but in a very concise and readable form. By default, it will show you every running process, but this can usefully be restricted to, say, non-system processes, so you can limit it down to your user applications.

You can specify the individual columns to be displayed, even down to .Net Jitted Methods and other development related tasks. You can add a CPU usage graph for each process, a memory usage per process graph and many other useful items.

In the main total cpu usage graph at the top of the form, hovering the mouse-pointer over a peak will show which process was causing it, useful when you’re trying to ascertain over a period of time what may be slowing your machine down.

Double-clicking on a particular process provides you with a wealth of information (see screenshot below), down to the stack trace and thread start addresses.

I’d strongly recommend this application to anyone who may be having problems with their PC performance (i.e. for identifying potential viruses or spyware), or who wants to monitor their own applications for memory leaks and performance issues.