Beau Jackson

These days, I earn my living writting software.  I use the C# programming language (which is nice, but has its shortcomings – that’s another post all on its own some day).  I can humbly say I know a LOT about the Windows operating system in its various incarnations.  And I’m a pretty fair hand when it comes to hardware configuration, maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair.

But I must be losing my geeky mojo.  It used to be I would search out and discover things for the simple joy of knowing about it.  I surprised myself today by finding a new tool (that I’m sure some of you…cough…Mike…cough) are probably already aware of and have been using for some time.

As a developer, I watch task manager a lot to see what is pegging my system or eating up my RAM.  If I notice my system behaving oddly or slowly, it’s almost always the first thing I check.  Usually there’s a run away process (yeah, I’m looking at you DLOClient.exe!) and I kill it and get on with life.  So if you’re like me, and you look at the process list with any frequency, I’m sure you’ve noticed a process (usually several) called svchost.exe.

Svchost.exe is used to run a bunch of different things as windows services.  Usually svchost.exe behaves itself pretty well, but sometimes one or more of the svchost processes will use an extraordinary amount of RAM.  Today was one of those times for me, and I finally got exasperated enough to find a tool that would tell me what svchost.exe was really running.

Which brings us to the tool I mentioned earlier.  It’s called ProcessExplorer.  I don’t know why the heck Microsoft doesn’t just ship this thing with Windows in the first place.  It told me everything I needed to know.  I should have searched it out ages ago.  Sigh.  I’m losing my mojo.

Anyhow, if you’re constantly checking your system processes, I highly recommend it.