Process Explorer is a small yet very advanced process management tool capable to offer in-depth details about running processes.
The interface is designed to offer a clean look of all the running items, in a parent-child tree view. It may look pretty daunting at first, but average users should get used with this sort of layout pretty fast.
The different sections of the application can display additional content, such as DLLs used by each process, handles and threads.
All the regular process management options are supported by Process Explorer: termination, setting priority or affinity (if you're running it in a multi-core environment). However, it also makes available the possibility to restart processes or suspend their activity until you identify them.
In order to help you determine the origin of a process or whether it is malicious or not, the application allows you to perform an online search, straight from its context menu.
The amount of information Process Explorer can render about a running item is impressive. This includes details about process performance (CPU time, threads, CPU history, I/O reads/writes, CPU cycles, etc.) memory, handles, or DLLs.
For real-time information regarding an item you can check its 'Properties' window, which shows a graphical representation of the overall performance, as well as other details such as I/O priority, virtual and physical memory used, or CPU history.
If you get accustomed with the level of details provided by Process Explorer, you can very well use it instead of the default solution in Windows, Task Manager.
Process Explorer is definitely not an application for the beginner, despite the comprehensive help file it comes with. The great amount of process data and control options it provides are clearly designed to accommodate the needs of more experienced users.
What's New in This Release:
· This major Process Explorer release includes heat-map display for process CPU, private bytes, working set and GPU columns, sortable security groups in the process properties security page, and tooltip reporting of tasks executing in Windows 8 Taskhostex processes. It also creates dump files that match the bitness of the target process and works around a bug introduced in Windows 8 disk counter reporting.