TecH: Tools for the NOT-so Faint of Heart! 1 of ?? in a series

Stuff will go in this post about the Sysinternals and winternals.com web sites, and their tools, and HOW they can be used.

1) procexp.exe Process Explorer.
Easy. Think Task manager on STEROIDS, or HUMAN growth HORMONE (or anything that Barry Bonds might use that might not be street legal.

Describing Process explorer to someone who is new to computing is like explaining to a person who has been blind from birth, what it is like to drive.

All text below this is from the sysinternals web site.

Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, (AKA Program including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in


It will allow you to kill things that normal task manager won't let you do, like kill lsass (the Local server authentication sub-system) This is what lets you log in as a user, and normally task manager prevents you from killing that task.

NOT this puppy. No way, no-sir-ee. You want to kill LSASS.exe, fine. Kill it, and you'll reboot your PC in a minute, and can't undo or stop the reboot.

As an example, in the picture above, presume you were watching a video and quicktime installed itself. Did you know that quicktime also SILENTLY installs the ITUNES software, and a itunes service on your machine???
If you wanted, you could highlight the service called ipodservice.exe, and right click to kill it!

Imagine if you have lots of SPAM running on your machine. this is a powerful tool to help you avoid it!.

Download Process Explorer here...(for XP/Win2K, win2003, etc) But don't say I didn't warn you how powerful it is!