ProcX shows you which Windows services can be safely terminated

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

ProcX shows you which Windows services can be safely terminated

by Brad Linder Mar 13th 2008

The Windows task manager might show you a list of running processes, but it does a pretty poor job of letting you know what some of those processes are actually doing. You don't need a Ph.D, to figure out what will happen if you terminate firefox.exe because it's using up 100% of your CPU cycles, but what about spudsvc.exe?

ProcX is a free utility that will show a list of running processes also shows you which applications they're associated with. Sometimes that information might not be particularly helpful, such as when you find out that an process is associated with "services" or "explorer." But it might help you figure out if ending a process will end an application you didn't mean to kill.

You can also use ProcX to show network access, display DLLs loaded by a process, and delete, rename, or suspend/resume a process or DLL. You can also use the program to search for a process name using Google.

[via XFuture Blog]

Tags: processes, procx, services, task-manager

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jason said 9:58PM on 3-13-2008

Anyone who knows what Process Explorer is would, I think, have no reason to even try this.

Brian said 10:06PM on 3-13-2008

Yes, Process Explorer (formerly a Sysinternals product, which was bought by Microsoft) is way better. WAY BETTER.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

z0iid said 10:06PM on 3-13-2008

For information and usefulness - yes, Process Explorer has been, and still is the king. But since it is fairly popular now - and considered a windows api, smart rootkit writers can hide processes, dlls, etc from Process Explorer. Don't believe me? You can go to www.rootkit.com and dl a sample of "vanquish" or "hacker defender". Both can hide from Process Explorer - and Autoruns. A decent addition is: gmer.exe It is buggy, and your computer might crash using it - but it can see processes that Process Explorer can't see (and kill them), remove drivers/services that Autoruns can't. Plus it has a really nice logging function to see what goes on during bootup - what parent processes are creating child threads, etc. And if you boot up in "gmer safe mode" - it really is safe mode. Which then allows you to find, delete, remove, etc drivers/services/files that Unlocker and other utilities fail at.

Yes - the gui for it sucks, and the information you get on processes sucks compared to Process Explorer. But like I said, it is a worth addition to your tool kit.

kingkool68 said 11:09PM on 3-13-2008

Agreed! Process Explorer takes the cake.

Stuart Halliday said 4:23PM on 3-14-2008

Well this ProcX stinks.

*You can't restart an app.

*You can't even resize the window apart from hitting the Maximise icon for goodness sake.

Has the programmer actually used this as the basic GUI design is shocking awful.

Process Explorer remains King.
Why look for something new that isn't broken?

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