If you haven’t heard of Systernals.com’s Process Explorer you should definitely check it out and use it instead of Task Manager for monitoring processes and get information about the application running on your system. I can’t count the number of times Process Explorer has helped me track problems down with applications by providing detailed info on running processes.

Process Explorer basically provides the same information as Task Manager does and then some. It provides much more information of course. For example, it knows about .NET and if the runtime is loaded into a process and provides you .NET specific information about a process. Need to list DLLs that are loaded into a process? Process Explorer lets you view this info at a glance. Need to debug threads, check TCP/IP connectivity (what server is this app talking to again?), figure out real memory (not just working set), figure out .NET security permission requirements and much, much more…

All I can say is get this thing – it’s free and definitely a no brainer. I'm posting this today as I was at a client today and really needed a couple of the features in a pinch and the client was just  blown away that he never heard of it before.

Now you know!