A lot of Windows users these days are used to tracking down and killing a runaway program. When a program isn’t responding or the whole system just seems sluggish for some reason, you hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc (or maybe Ctrl-Alt-Del) to bring up the Windows Program Manager and see if any programs or processes listed are using a lot of CPU (that’s your processor). But often times you may have noticed that when you do this, no programs or processes stand out as the culprit. The System Idle Process is accounting for the majority of the CPU (as it should when your computer isn’t thinking hard on something) and you’re stumped.

Well, my computer at work is regularly (and mind numbingly) slow. And it’s not the processor speed or even the RAM size (although I wouldn’t mind more of either). It’s the hard drive.

Now, it’s really not fair to blame the hard drive. Firstly, all remotely affordable hard drives are pretty slow compared to a computer’s processor and RAM (and most laptops are even worse, as they tend to use even slower hard drives). Hard drives (along with fans and optical drives) are pretty much the only moving parts in a computer, and are therefore usually the biggest bottleneck in most computer operations. It’s faster to say “fuchsia” then it is to go running down the paint isle at a store and bring a can of fuchsia up to the check-out lanes.

Secondly, the network security people (or some other group or combination of groups that have rights to make computer do things without my consent) at my company are idiots. Defragmenting, installing software updates and patches, indexing files for faster searching, looking for viruses, and scanning my hard drive for unapproved programs are all pretty good things (except maybe for that last one). But there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to do them ALL AT ONCE. Especially not starting the moment I log in in the morning. This is very bad, and it’s effecting my entire department (and assumedly many others as well). Forget grabbing a can of fuchsia paint. My hard drive’s been given a 40 page shopping list, no shopping cart, and asked to straighten things up on the shelves while it’s at it. I’m lucky if it has time to load my email program in less than half an hour.

So I need to abandon the old ctrl-alt-del Task Manager and use something that can tell me what’s monopolizing the hard drive. Enter Process Explorer.

Process Explorer is a free, small program created by Sysinternals (and eventually bought out by Microsoft). You can think of it as the Task Manager on steroids….super steroids. Within its preferences, you can specify lots of different information to be displayed about the individual processes running on your computer. Remember, a program is just a bunch of bytes that can start and manage a process or multiples processes; just because you didn’t open it or see it on your task bar doesn’t mean it’s not running and taking up valuable computer resources.

By default, Process Explorer shows familiar variables like CPU and Memory, but when you add columns for “I/O Delta Reads” and “I/O Delta Writes”, all of a sudden you can sort by either of these and see who’s tipping your hard drive upside down and stealing its lunch money…and kill it. There are a few in here you won’t want to mess with, such as CSRSS.EXE and SVCHOST.EXE, as doing anything with them will probably freeze your entire system or force a reboot. Generally, unless you know what it is (things like Word or Messenger are ok), it’s a good ideal to ignore any process with “Microsoft” in the name.

Here at the office, killing any of the scripted jobs that the system admins scheduled for me just results in that processes immediately opening up again and resuming where it left off or starting over. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to completely impede good things like security updates and other system maintenance. So I can use Process Explorer to SUSPEND a process. This doesn’t kill it, meaning it doesn’t pop up again either, but it does tell the computer to put it on ice until I go back and set it to resume. This seems to work for most things, although I’ve noticed Norton Anti-Virus plugging away on a full system scan while supposedly suspended anyway. Still, it’s repeatedly brought my computer back from the brink of uselessness when I needed to get something done right away.

What about when you do see multiple processes fighting for CPU power instead of just hard drive access? You can kill them or suspend them like you did with the hard drive hogs. But what if you want some of them to stay running, just less aggressively? That’s where a process’s “priority” comes in. Does your MP3 keep stuttering while Photoshop applies a filter to a photo? Increase the priority setting of your audio player program, and Windows will give it CPU priority even when Photoshop is chugging away. Transcoding some video files to a different format? Lower the program’s priority so other things you do on the computer don’t get slowed down (at the expense of your transcoding taking longer to complete).

Especially in a home environment where you can’t get in trouble for taking control of your PC, I highly recommend Process Explorer for looking under the hood when things aren’t right.