Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It can also trace the entire boot process and save to a PML log file. When enabling the setting “Enable Boot Logging” from the Options menu in Process Monitor, the following error may pop up:
Summary: This post tells you how to track process creation and exit events using the Process Monitor utility. My previous post, List Running Processes, helps you track down currently running processes. And the article Command Prompt Opens and Closes immediately tells you if a last run program window was a scheduled task or not.
A well-written application does proper error handling, notifying the user in detail about the error it countered and how to go about fixing it, rather than failing silently or throwing up an obscure error code and quitting. This post tells you how to trace "Access Denied" events for file and registry activities occurring in the … Read more
Process Monitor is an excellent troubleshooting tool from Windows Sysinternals that displays the files and registry keys that applications access in real-time. The results can be saved to a log file, which you can send to an expert for analyzing a problem and troubleshooting it. This article tells you how to use Process Monitor to … Read more
Many folks use Process Explorer from Windows Sysinternals to gather information about running processes and their open handles. In addition, there is an excellent but less familiar utility in-built with Windows 7 and higher (including Windows 10/11). The built-in utility is Resource Monitor, which provides complete details of running processes, their associated handles, and associated … Read more
When you attempt to delete a file or folder which is in use by a process, the File In Use dialog appears showing the name of the program that has locked the file. However, there are cases where the “File In Use” dialog doesn’t show the name of the process that has a lock on … Read more
If you’re on a slow or capped connection, keeping an eye on the downloads which might be happening at the background is essential. This post explains how to find which programs are currently accessing the internet or transferring data to and from a remote server, and at what speed. The much useful built-in tool, and … Read more
You may have come across situations where a continuous hard disk activity taking place although your system being in an idle state. If you open Task Manager out of curiosity, you may find several processes starting and exiting of their own without you doing anything. It could be a scheduled backup task, third-party system maintenance … Read more
Out of all the built-in troubleshooting tools in Windows, Task Manager is probably the most useful tool. Almost every end-user knows what to do when an application stalls. They just fire up Task Manager using Ctrl + Shift + Esc and end the nonresponsive task. Also, Task Manager can be an extremely valuable tool to … Read more
You may notice that some programs don’t run when you double-click on the icon of the program. However, they run if you right-click on the icon and then click “Run as Administrator”; whereas the same programs used to run just fine even without elevation.
