14 DAY TRIAL // Are you willing to get your hands dirty and look into every nook and cranny of your copy of Windows Vista? Well, this is what Process Explorer is all about. Delivering Vista on a silver platter for your monitoring pleasure. And of course that the utility is by no means limited to Microsoft's latest Windows platform. As a matter of fact, version 11.0 Process Explorer also comes with support for Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003 and 64-bit versions of Windows for x64 and IA64 processors, according to Microsoft. And like all the free utilities designed to offer insight into the inner workings of the Windows operating system, Process Explorer is the child of Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Technical Fellow, formerly of Sysinternals.
"The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you'll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you'll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded," revealed Russinovich.
Essentially Process Explorer is designed to tell you what specific file or directories are opened by programs running in Windows Vista. If you are interested in getting data on opened or loaded handles and DLLs associated with active processes, then Process Explorer is the right tools to get the job done. However, Process Explorer is not a new offering from Microsoft. But version 11.0 is, and as you might expect it delivers a set of modifications.
The update introduces a new treelist control offering superior graphical user interface responsiveness. "Asynchronous thread symbol resolution on threads tab of process properties; more flags on groups in security tab and SID display; thread IDs on threads tab and on-line search uses default web browser and search engine," are also among the new capabilities of the tool.
Still Microsoft did focus extensively on the integration of Process Explorer into Windows Vista, and in this context, a number of enhancements are connected with the operating system alone. "Vista ASLR column for processes and DLLs; Vista Process and thread I/O and memory priorities in process and thread properties; Vista Process and thread I/O and memory columns; PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION support on process permissions on Vista; run as limited user runs with low IL; reports information for all object types; show details for all processes elevation menu item and supports replacement of task manager on Vista," are all the improvements involving Microsoft's latest operating system.