Windows Vista Tips:Find Out What’s Hogging Your System
A very useful free tool to investigate such problems is Process Explorer utility. Download it from the link, unpack it into a directory somewhere in your user profile, and use it as your Windows Task Manager replacement.The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window of Process Explorer always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information about the process displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you’ll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you’ll see the DLL’s and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLL’s loaded When I run it, I typically select “Show Details for All Processes” in the File menu to run it as an admin so I can see information from system services, as well as my own applications.Open the Process Explorer and turn on the CPU History and I/O History ,under Options and run it in the System Tray. If things start to bog down, we can glance at the CPU and I/O meters to see if either of them is peaking. If they are, hover the mouse over the meters to find out what’s using the most of either one of those resources.

Constant hard disk drive activity in your Windows Vista computer is one of the symptoms that many people cite as evidence that something is wrong. Using Process Explorer utility, you can easily figure out what’s causing all that issue in your computer, and to what end. If your hard disk is in use, but the I/O history in Process Explorer is flat or very low, that means whatever’s running is doing so at such a low level of I/O priority that anything you do is likely to override it immediately anyway.
Some of the Windows processes that run in background might use I/O or CPU system resources(also known as Services). Here’s a few of the most common Windows processes that consumes system resources and what they do:
- TASKENG.EXE: The Task Scheduler Engine. Anything that’s run as a scheduled task (such as a disk defragmentation operation) in your computer will typically show up with this process as the host process.
- SVCHOST.EXE: Service Host, a process that runs system services in your computer. If you double-click on a SVCHOST.EXE process in Process Explorer and then click on the Services tab, you’ll see what services are running under SVCHOST.EXE process. You can also hover the mouse over the SVCHOST.EXE instance in the Process Explorer task list and see a tool tip that lists all of the services running under that process.
- TrustedInstaller.exe: A system process used to perform installations of system components, such as Windows Updates and other system components updates.In many cases the process TrustedInstaller.exe starts up with the computer, runs very aggressively for a couple of minutes,with consuming large amount of CPU and RAM and sometimes interrupting or slowing down other programs and processes, like games,web browsers and then stops.
Another nice feature of Process Explorer utility is that you can display a “company name” column for any given executable process in your computer to find out who made the thing.
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