Unlike Process Explorer, which simply shows you process information in relatively real time, Process Monitor works by collecting data for a period of time and then gives you various tools to review and analyze the data collected. Make sure that Enable Advanced Output is not checked on the Filter menu. Press CTRL+E to stop the data collection for now. Procmon allows us to monitor almost all of the activity of processes running on your machine, including who’s accessing the disk.Īfter downloading and running procmon, it’ll start collecting data immediately: To figure out what’s really going on, we’re going to start by downloading a powerful (if extremely geeky) utility called Process Monitor, or “procmon” (not to be confused with another great utility, Process Explorer, or “procexp”). It’s not really telling you anything valuable.

When it comes to disk activity, you can pretty much ignore CPU usage. 2% CPU usage or even much less is plenty to keep the disk busy. 98% idle makes total sense, even if the disk is thrashing as you describe. For a CPU, “waiting” means “doing nothing,” which in Process Explorer is considered idle. The CPU is much faster than the disk, which means it’s actually spending most of its time waiting for the disk to read or write data.

It’s quite possible for your CPU to be doing “nothing” while your disk thrashes. Let’s start by clarifying the CPU-usage issue. We’ll look at using Process Monitor to see if we can determine just exactly who’s doing what to your machine. FileMon has been replaced by a significantly more powerful utility, Process Monitor. In the past, I’ve recommended a tool called FileMon to determine what’s been writing to your disk.

Your assumption that CPU usage is telling you something is incorrect. One thing I can tell you is, it’s not outside of Windows.

Process monitor windows xp