If you use Windows XP you might be familiar with situations in which XP starts to slow down due to a running process or application that suck up most of its resources. Normally what you do is open the (good?) and old Task Manager and see if you can kill a process or terminate a running application and hopefully Windows will stop crawling.

The thing with Task Manager is that it doesn’t give you much information about the underlying DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries) or what resources your system actually uses,and thus makes it difficult for you to find the root cause of your system’s performance deterioration.

Here’s exactly where Microsoft Process Explorer helps you out. This free and extra cool utility is actually an advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager leaves off. Note that you can actually have Process Explorer replacing Task Manager (via Options || Replace Task Manager)

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window (accessible from View || Lower Pane), which you can close, depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you will see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you will see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded.
The Process Explorer display can be easily customized via the menu View || Select Columns.
To start analyzing your PC performance, go to View || Select Columns || Process Performance and check CPU Time (used to monitor CPU usage) and Virtual Size (used to monitor memory usage).

Process Explorer can be download for free from Microsoft Technet.
To install, just unzip the downloaded archive and click on the .exe file.

Enjoy!

[tags] Process Explorer, Windows XP [/tags]