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These few months, I had been suffering an annoying problem whereby whenever I startup my company notebook, I had to wait for around 10 minutes due to a system process called “svchost.exe” that took away all the CPU time, and because of that I couldn’t do anything until the process “cool down” by itself

Clueless about what was the real culprit, I did a google and finally came across a program called “ProcessExplorer“. This useful utility is similar to the good old “Windows Task Manager” but it has some extra goodies that allow me to drill down to another level to see what programs are making use of the generic system processes like explorer.exe and svchost.exe, and even to kill it on the spot. This actually helped me to identify the culprit – Automatic Update was the service that took away all my CPU resource and I’ve eventually set it to “Manual”.

Other than that, there are plenty unique capabilities of ProcessExplorer for handling leaks, troubleshooting, and provide more insight into the way Windows and applications work. What’s more, the installation of ProcessExplorer is effortless (it doesn’t need installation at all, to be precise), and it also supports the latest Windows Vista.

ProcessExplorer can be downloaded here, and for your reference, please checkout the screenshot above for comparison between conventional Task Manager and ProcessExplorer.