Hi
I've been doing some heavy armwrestling w/ my WinXP pro recently (mainly
due to a difference of opinion w/ M$ on the quality of messenger...) but
it started me taking a long hard look at my processes - a lot of which
seem to be duplicates of (for example) svchost and others. My question is:
Is there any program, that does a more decent job of keeping track of
processes than inbuilt task manager (which often states System Idle as
using 99% processor power, when in reality it's chucking merrily away at
something), and is there anywhere, where I can find out just what the h
the different processes are?

tia

"hhk" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi
> I've been doing some heavy armwrestling w/ my WinXP pro recently (mainly
> due to a difference of opinion w/ M$ on the quality of messenger...) but
> it started me taking a long hard look at my processes - a lot of which
> seem to be duplicates of (for example) svchost and others. My question is:
> Is there any program, that does a more decent job of keeping track of
> processes than inbuilt task manager (which often states System Idle as
> using 99% processor power, when in reality it's chucking merrily away at
> something), and is there anywhere, where I can find out just what the h
> the different processes are?

Task Manager accurately reports the usage of all processes.
If system idle is showing 99& then any other executing processes are
actually only using 1% etc.
There is also no problem with multiple processes running with the same name.
Particularly svchost, which is actually a host process used to start others
(such as some services) and as such it is perfectly feasible to have many
running as each on may have started a service.

In general there is no need for any user intervention in the running process
list and stopping running processes may cause system instability or loss of
data.


--
Regards,

Mike
--
Mike Brannigan [Microsoft]

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
rights

Please note I cannot respond to e-mailed questions, please use these
newsgroups

"hhk" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi
> I've been doing some heavy armwrestling w/ my WinXP pro recently (mainly
> due to a difference of opinion w/ M$ on the quality of messenger...) but
> it started me taking a long hard look at my processes - a lot of which
> seem to be duplicates of (for example) svchost and others. My question is:
> Is there any program, that does a more decent job of keeping track of
> processes than inbuilt task manager (which often states System Idle as
> using 99% processor power, when in reality it's chucking merrily away at
> something), and is there anywhere, where I can find out just what the h
> the different processes are?
>
> tia

Hi,

Some of the processes that seem to be duplicates are not. There are some
services or DLL's that will run under SVCHOST for instance, instead of under
a seperate process. You could use some resource kit utilities to see what
dll's are linked to the process and work out what applications are running
under this process from these.

You may find that there is some disk activity while the system idle is
siting at 99%. This would be because the file system is doing something,
defrag, possibly retrieving info from the pagefile. Basically processes that
do not require a lot of processor overhead. As the % listed is for CPU use,
this will show the processor as idle when the machine is quite obviously
doing something.



--
Regards
Simon Woolley

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send email to this address, post a reply to this newsgroup.

"hhk" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi
> I've been doing some heavy armwrestling w/ my WinXP pro recently (mainly
> due to a difference of opinion w/ M$ on the quality of messenger...) but
> it started me taking a long hard look at my processes - a lot of which
> seem to be duplicates of (for example) svchost and others. My question is:
> Is there any program, that does a more decent job of keeping track of
> processes than inbuilt task manager (which often states System Idle as
> using 99% processor power, when in reality it's chucking merrily away at
> something), and is there anywhere, where I can find out just what the h
> the different processes are?
>
> tia

While the other replies are accurate they don't really answer your question do they? www.blkviper.com has a whole bunch of info on system processes, what they do, and how to configure them. If your system is still chugging away while you seem to be doing nothing then it's probably the indexing or boot optimizer running. You really don't need indexing if you are a stand alone home user. So turn that off. The boot optimizer function will run about every 3 days of CPU up time and only when it notes your system is idle for an extended period of time. System restore will also run for a short burst when your OS is idle. System restore is really quite a useless piece of programming so like the indexing turn it off. Good luck.

The Unknown P wrote:
> While the other replies are accurate they don't really answer your question do they? www.blkviper.com has a whole bunch of info on system processes, what they do, and how to configure them. If your system is still chugging away while you seem to be doing nothing then it's probably the indexing or boot optimizer running. You really don't need indexing if you are a stand alone home user. So turn that off. The boot optimizer function will run about every 3 days of CPU up time and only when it notes your system is idle for an extended period of time. System restore will also run for a short burst when your OS is idle. System restore is really quite a useless piece of programming so like the indexing turn it off. Good luck.
thanks a lot - that answers much...cheers