Are you a Windows User?, Do you know the software called 'Process Explorer'?

image.png
Process Explorer running on my computer.
Note: you must run this as administrator to use its full potential.


as I wrote in my description, Process Explorer is Task Manager on Steroids. I have used this software extensively in the Windows XP PRO days until Windows 7. now I checked in its website and found out they updated it for windows 8.1 and above.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

Yes, Process Explorer is an official program from Microsoft. It's not readily available out of the box because a normal user would not need this kind of access. it will do more harm than good.

using Process Explorer together with Process Monitor,
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon
I was able to removed viruses and spyware easily back in the days. but as you may well know their elusiveness has gotten better over the years.


Diagnostics

CPU Usage Monitor
image.png

this is the cpu usage graph.
the green represents CPU USAGE from the softwares. because only my Chrome browser is open it's very low.
the red represents SYSTEM INTERRUPTS. system interrupts are normal to have. it's the communication between Software to Hardware.

but should SYSTEM INTERRUPTS overwhelm the CPU USAGE. it means a driver or a faulty hardware needs to be examined.

Memory Usage Monitor
image.png

and this is why a mechanical Hard Drive is essentially dead as a boot drive for windows 8 and above.

this is going to be confusing but I will try to explain it as easy as possible.

The System Commit Graph is the total memory demand.

The Physical Memory Graph is the total memory in physical RAM being used.

image.png

The Commit Charge is the ACTUAL memory usage here.
The 'Current' is the demand.
The 'Limit' is the total memory available.
The 'Peak' is the demand when I'm doing Memory Intensive stuff (e.g. playing videogames)

Now you might have notice that the Limit is set to 20.9GB. but I only have 16GB of Physical Ram.
so where does that 4GB extra came from? it came from Virtual Memory A.K.A. the Pagefile.

image.pngimage.png

Virtual Memory uses the selected storage(Boot Drive by default) as memory. you can also use the other storage as Virtual Memory.

you can even use USBs as Virtual Memory using ReadyBoost.

image.png

I have trailed off. Ok.

So by default. the system uses virtual memory for services. hence why Mechanical Hard Drives are a bad choice for boot drives in Windows 8 and above.

If your system is slow due to your boot drive being a Mechanical Hard Drive but have a high amount of Physical RAM, you could disable Virtual Memory. or you could buy a SSD and set that as Virtual Memory.

I/O
image.png
Note: It's not shown here but if you point your mouse to the activity,
it will tell which program is doing the selected activity and the exact numbers.

the next graph is about I/O. Input and Output or maybe it's Incoming and Outcoming.

the graph shows activity in the storage and network space when it comes to data.

The first bump which affected the I/O and the Disk is when I tried copying a file from my hdd to my usb.

The Second bump which affected the I/O and Network is when I went to speedtest.net and made a internet benchmark.

GPU
image.png

and finally there's GPU or Videocard Usage. yeah. it's definitely not for normal people. 😆


Process Manager

Let's start by telling you about my favorite function of Process explorer and those are PRIORITY and AFFINITY.

PRIORITY
image.png

As you can see, you set priorities to the programs. very useful in multitasking such as same-computer online streaming.

AFFINITY
image.png

Basically it allows you to set how how many threads a process is allowed to use.

Note: Not all processes have this feature.

For that we will need a program.

20220705133651_1.jpg
GTA V

image.png
Thisi s what it looks like in default all threads enabled.
image.png
Then when using only four threads. No FPS Change.
image.png
And then Only using Dual Threads.
image.png
32 FPS for two threads. this is amazing, the fact that this game can work in dual core.

AFFINITY is really good. because some programs are having issues when assigned to thread count that it was not designed for.

Accessing the Properties of a Process

image.png

Scan using Virus Total
image.png
Which will then ask you to allow sending a hash of the program to Virus Total.
image.png
which will then write the result here which you can click.
image.png
which will then send you to VirusTotal website with the specific hash.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c38e4da006945cc26c4e296f1d4fb89da5f2288813bcfa28498d31a4e3bc2df6/detection

It can kill processes much better than the default Task Manager.

Yep and then some other functions that I don't even want to know.


MISC

And that is pretty much what is Process Explorer is.
image.png
You can definitely Replace your default Task Manager with it.
image.png
And edit the look as you see fit.


Afterword

I decided to write about process explorer so that people might know about it. so that it might help other people as it helped me. It is a powerful program.

There's nothing more I could write about it anymore.

I am tagging hivegc because I used a GTA V screenshot. 😂

Llama Llama. 🤣

Cheers. 😆

H2
H3
H4
3 columns
2 columns
1 column
Join the conversation now
Logo
Center