System Monitoring Processes & Threads

Process Explorer from SysInternal is a Task Manager on steroids. If you ever wondered about program libraries, dll processes and all those background running applications and services then Process Explorer might be able to help you. PE shows you information about which handles and dlls processes have opened or is loaded. PE gives you a running processes hierarchical display that shows detailed information on how certain applications work and maybe provide a little insight into the way Windows and applications react. PE is more gung-ho than Task Manager so you have to be careful as you can now kill a process and more so if you end the whole process tree.

Unless you’ve very well versed in all the inner workings of windows, you’d most probably not know what each process is. PE helps you along by providing by including a built-in search function that is tied to Google and MSN search (why on earth MSN? I don’t know). If you have no idea about the function of a certain process, right click the process and select Google and you’d be sent on your way to sites that explains what that process is all about.

Another nice feature of PE also shows what TCP/IP connection a process opened. particularly useful for looking out for rootkits, spywares, trojans that try to call back home. PE also has a performance monitor which has all the trapping for a GUI charts and graphs freak. Seeing how much more powerful PE is, the authors included an option to replace your Task Manager with it by Options | Replace Task Manager and will now launch instead of Task Manager.

Download from here.