Process Monitor - great for working out what's wrong with apps

[Domarius]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...essmonitor.mspx

This is bloody useful, if for nothing more than to see where your all your computer resources are being spent.

 

But you can use it to monitor registry and file activity of any running processes, it's great.

 

So you could hunt down spyware apps that way, or you could work out what's wrong with a program that's not behaving the way it should.

 

 

For example - Doom 3 "exportModels" command has been halting with NO error messages, but in Process Monitor, after several file accesses, I can see it tried to access a Maya registry entry and was disallowed - reason "Max Allowed" whatever that means. But at least it's somewhere to start.

 

 

Also if a program looks like it's locked up, you can run Process Monitor and see if it's actually doing anything behind the scenes, so you know wether to hang around or just terminate it

[sparhawk]

These tools were all open sourced, when sys internals still was their owner. Apparently MS doesn't follow that anymore. For RegMon and FileMon I still have the source, but it's pretty old.

[Domarius]

Ah - yeah actually I read about FileMon and RegMon because a thread at Doom3World (started in 2004) mentioned it, and it's how he solved the same problem I had - exportModels just aborting with no message. But in his case it was Doom 3 (surprise) looking in the wrong location for a DLL. He copied it to the location it was trying to find it "D:\Games\bin\" (obviously a stuff up on Doom's part) and exportModels started working for him again.

 

So I searched for FileMon, and then found the main page for it, and a note saying that Process Manager included features from RegMon and FileMon but was re-writted from scratch to support WinXP etc, and superceeded FileMon, so I searched for that instead.

 

Incidently my problem with Doom 3 was similar, this time it was a registry entry I had to fake for it. Posting about it in my journal and doing up a wiki page.