Process Explorer is a small but advanced process management tool capable to offer in-depth details about running processes.

The interface is designed to offer a clean look at all running items, in a parent-child relationship view. It may look pretty daunting at first, but average users should get used with this sort of layout pretty fast.

On the other hand, advanced users should have absolutely no difficulty navigating to the different section of the application and enabling it to show various, additional content, such as DLLs used by each process, handles or threads.

All the regular process management options are supported by Process Explorer: termination, setting priority or affinity (if you’re running it in a multi-core environment). However, it also makes available the possibility to restart processes or suspend their activity until you identify them.

In order to help you determine the origin of a process or if it is malicious or not, the application allows you to perform an online search straight from its context menu.

The amount of information Process Explorer can render about a running item is impressive. The app can retrieve so many details about a process that even an advanced user would feel tingly all over. This includes details about process performance (CPU time, threads, CPU history, I/O reads/writes, CPU cycles, etc.) memory, handles, or DLLs.

For real-time information about an item you can check its “Properties” window, which shows a graphical representation of its performance, as well as performance details such as I/O priority, virtual and physical memory used, or CPU history.

If you get accustomed with the level of details provided by Process Explorer you can use it instead of the default solution in Windows, Task Manager.

Process Explorer is definitely not a tool for the beginner user, despite the comprehensive help file it comes with. But power users should definitely take a look.