Using Process Explorer to Troubleshoot and Diagnose.What Are the SysInternals Tools and How Do You Use Them?.Why can’t the designers fix these things? Oh well, job security for techs like us. Even though they all claim to stop or slow down when the computer is in use, that never seems to happen. I wish mfgs would put a big HD activity light on the monitor frame.Īlso, the many culprits recently have been indexing and backup programs. It is amazing to me that the #1 complaint users have is that there computer is running slow, and most of the time it is becuase of excessive hard drive activity, yet 1) manufacturers make the hard drive activity light tiny and hard to see and 2) Windows does not include a HD activity monitor (until you install Process Explorer. I use just that one and not the other three.

33, the word “Bytes” is added to the column name, as in “I/O Delta Read Bytes.” I mention this in case you are looking for “I/O Delta Read” and can’t find it :).Īlso, the most useful column for me is “I/O Delta Total Bytes.” That sums the three others (read, write, other) into a single column. Instant Fundas has more details.Īt least with Process Explorer v11. Update – You can also use the Disk Activity tab in the built-in Resource Monitor.

Click on the column header and the offending process will leap to the top. Next time your hard drive starts churning and you want to know what’s causing it, get Process Explorer, go to View -> Select Columns, Process Performance and enable the three columns column I mentioned above.

I turned on other and it shot to the top of the list with a few hundred a second. It was scanning thousands of files so there was obviously disk usage, but the process had no reads or writes. I didn’t know about the I/O Delta Other until I was running a disk scan. The trick is to enable the following three columns one column: I/O Delta Total Bytes I searched high and low for a tool to show processes ordered by current disk activity and eventually found what I was looking for in Process Explorer. Nothing stands out with high CPU or memory use and the network traffic is all but nil. The only thing missing was an easy way to see what processes were using the disk.Įvery once in a while my hard drive begins churning and it’s a little disconcerting to have no idea what it’s doing. Process Explorer from SysInternals does a great job of showing processor and memory use (overall and for each process) and NetStat Live displays incoming and outgoing network traffic. I’ve had no trouble finding processor, memory and network monitoring tools on Windows.

Sysinternals process monitor cpu time