The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy » DLL

August Sysinternals Update

Nathan Simon — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:52:00 +0000

I’ve said it time and time again, Sysinternals is one of the best names in the IT industry, without it, I wouldn’t be the tech I am today. With that said, there are some program and blog updates from the 16th of this month that I wanted to make sure got some extra attention.

Process Explorer is at v15. The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

ProcDump is at v4 now. ProcDump is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps during a spike that an administrator or developer can use to determine the cause of the spike.

Mark, one of the sysinternal developers, added a blog where he was trying to play Portal 2, he used his own utilities to find what was causing the issue.

Check the site out here.

Process Explorer v14.01

Nathan Simon — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 03:15:06 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Process Explorer you have been hiding under a rock! It is very handy for looking at processes, who the process belongs to, and what DLLs are bound to those processes. Process Explorer can be a direct replacement for task manager, its especially handy with Windows XP as the task manager is quite minimal. Windows 7 borrows some of Process Explorers features, if you’ve bothered to compare the two. Below is an insert from Systinternals highlighting the updates.

This major update to Process Explorer adds a slew of enhancements and new functionality including network and disk monitoring, an improved multi-tab system information dialog, additional memory statistics, a new column that shows aggregate CPU usage for a tree of processes, improved DLL scanning performance and accuracy, command-lines in process tree tooltips, support for more than 64 CPU systems, and more.

Click here to download and read more about this wonderful little app.