Process Explorer is a freewaretask manager and system monitor for Microsoft Windows created by SysInternals, which has been acquired by Microsoft and re-branded as Windows Sysinternals. It provides the functionality of Windows Task Manager along with a rich set of features for collecting information about processes running on the user's system. It can be used as the first step in debugging software or system problems. Process Explorer can be used to track down problems. For example, it provides a means to list or search for named resources that are held by a process or all processes. This can be used to track down what is holding a file open and preventing its use by another program. As another example, it can show the command lines used to start a program, allowing otherwise identical processes to be distinguished. Like Task Manager, it can show a process that is maxing out the CPU, but unlike Task Manager it can show which thread is using the CPU – information that is not even available under a debugger.
History
Process Explorer began in the early Sysinternals days as two separate utilities, HandleEx and DLLView, which were mergedin 2001. Until 2008, Process Explorer worked on Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Versions of Process Explorer up to 12.04 work on Windows 2000; versions 14.0 and higher do not require credui.dll. The current version runs on Windows XP and upwards. Version 15 added GPU monitoring for Windows Vista and later.
Interactively alter a service process's access security
Interactively set the priority of a process
Disambiguates service executables which perform multiple service functions. For example, when the pointer is placed over a svchost.exe, it will tell if it is the one performing automatic updates/secondary logon/etc., or the one providing RPC, or the one performing terminal services, and so on.
There is an option to verify a process in VirusTotal
There is an option to display DLLs loaded by process ; an option Show Lower Pane has to be switched on
There is an option to display processes' handles which includes named mutants, events, sockets, files, registry keys etc. ; an option Show Lower Pane has to be switched on
In properties of a process a user can view the process's threads and threads' stack traces
There is a command to create a process dump
There is a Find command which allows for searching a handle or DLL which can be used to identify the process holding a file lock.
