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Use windows process explorer utility to explore your computer/PC processes

 December 28, 2007 2 Comments

Do you use windows and do you find your computer/PC responding or working slowly,at times? i.e does opening or saving files take time? May be your hard drive is working hard!!! There could be a few background processes that has taken your hard disk hostage,due to high rate of disk reads/disk writes. This in turn forces your computer/PC to respond slowly as these processes overloads the physical limitations of your hard disk.Use process monitor to find information on all those processes running on your computer/PC.


Download process monitor from here if you don’t have it already.

  • Start process explorer(click procexp.exe)
  • Choose View –> “Select columns…” from the menu.
  • Click “Process performance” tab.
  • check I/O Reads, I/O Read Bytes, I/O Writes and I/O Write Bytes
  • Click “OK”
  • Process explorer will now list the new columns for each process running on your computer/PC.

    process explorer

    To identify which process is killing your hard disk, just look for the process with the highest number of Reads or Read Bytes.Then take appropriate action via the process menu.

    Filed under: Microsoft PC Tips

    2 Responses to “Use windows process explorer utility to explore your computer/PC processes”

    1. Vijay said:

      I simply use Process manager with Windows (Ctrl+alt+del) to check the processes and system loads! This sounds useful though!

      Vijay’s last blog post..How to Manipulate Lists Quickly and Easily?

    2. Rajesh said:

      yes this one is a much better utility from microsoft…

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