It is so rare that I actually find good and useful utilities for Windows XP, but these three I discovered today are something I wish Windows XP had been built with. Ever wonder what your machine was actually doing when the processor goes to 100% and the disk head is clunking left to right at a phenomenal rate? These recently re-branded applications from the Microsoft-enveloped Sysinternals site should shed some light on it…
Process Explorer
This is an extra detailed task manager, it shows everything about the processes currently running on your PC in a hierarchical view (to show what application opened the process). It has the functionality to not only show the current processor/memory usage, but also a neat little graph for each to show that usage over time and colour codes to show which applications are most active.
This is particularly useful to spot any rogue processes which may be sitting in the background using resources unnecessarily, which can then be killed, suspended or focussed. Unlike the standard task manager, this also has nice descriptions of the application’s vendor and the purpose of it, just a little nicety which makes all the difference.
Filemon
This is much simpler than Process Explorer, but still just as handy. It just lists all of the reads, writes and queries to your hard disks by each application you have running. Crucially it also states whether it was successful or not, perfect for those infinite loops when an application stops responding but there is no processor activity.
Regmon
Perhaps the least obviously useful application of the three, I still included it as it rounds them off nicely. This one shows all of the queries to the windows registry and which application is making them. Again, most importantly whether they were successful or not. If you are getting a whole bunch of requests which are not found perhaps it is time to do some registry cleaning, as this will inevitably slow down your machine.
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