Process Hacker – Another useful system tool

[Mirror - http://blog.whitejadesoft.com/?p=208 ]

You can get the tool from here: http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/. Enjoy it!

You may have already used Process Explorer (by Mark Russinovich, my idol)from sysinternals.com (acquired by Microsoft already). Process Explorer is a powerful tool I’ve used for couple of years. Many times it rescued me in trouble shooting.

 

Process Explorer is good enough. Why do you want another similar tool? Okay, let’s see what Process Hacker has provided.

 

Compared with Process Explorer, Process Hacker:

• Implements almost all of the functionality offered by Process Explorer, plus more advanced features.
• Has advanced string scanning capabilities, as well as regular expression filtering.
• Allows you to see what a thread is waiting on.
• Highlights relocated and .NET DLLs.
• Allows you to connect to other sessions, just like Windows Task Manager can.
• Shows symbolic access masks (e.g. Read, Write), rather than just numbers (e.g. 0x12019f).
• Shows names for transaction manager objects and ETW registration objects.
• Shows detailed token information, as well as allowing privileges to be enabled and disabled.
• Shows information for POSIX processes.
• Starts around 5 times faster than Process Explorer.
• Has around 8 times less background CPU usage.

Yeah! it provides some fantastic functionalities. Below lists my favorite ones:

• Allows you to see what a thread is waiting on.
• Starts around 5 times faster than Process Explorer.

 

Here is a screen shot of Process Hacker -

 

Here are some comments I have:

• It’s a pity that both Process Explorer and Process Hacker failed to restart Windows Service for me. www.whitejadesoft.com

But Process Explorer is more user friendly that it will first show up a warning that the service might not be able to restart successfully. Below is a sample:

 

While Process Hacker will only show a dialog for confirmation like below.

 

• There is a nice feature in Process Hacker. See the screen shot below first.

Anywhere if possible, you will see a button (the upper one in the picture) which lets you to browse the folder of the executable file (the .exe itself or its modules).

This is really nice for developers like me.

The second button in red is to let you find the parent process quickly. Very handy feature!

 

• Process Hacker supports plugins. Although I have not used any plugin so far, i believe to support plugins is a good thing.
• UI part – Process Hacker has some problem in its UI: when the “property” dialog (or other dialogs) resizes, the layout may mess up.
• Process Hacker has a cool feature that lets you inject DLL into a process. (in case you don’t have idea about DLL injection you can read Jeffrey Richter’s book )

 

Here lists only what I have so far. You can download Process Hacker if you love powerful tools like me. Enjoy!

Read more articles on my blog - http://blog.whitejadesoft.com/