I had a request recently from a CEO of a company. He wanted to be able to leave his computer running in his office and allow the screens to turn off WITHOUT the computer locking the screen. That is – he was often in and out of his office, and he got tired of entering his password to unlock his computer every time he returned to it. I did a fair bit of digging … [Read more...]
Meet Process Explorer–Task Manager on Steroids
I often use task manager and resource manager to get a better understanding of what is going on with the CPU and memory usage of a given EXE. However there is something better and that is Process Explorer. Process Explorer gives you far more detailed information around what is going on with a computer than either of those aforementioned tools. Below you can see a … [Read more...]
How can I see what a specific program is doing to my computer?
Often when investigating a problem, we need to see what a specific program is doing to the machine, or the registry, or accessing files etc. Process Monitor (also known as Procmon) is an awesome tool to be used for this. Procmon is a small exe file that you can download and run on a machine and it will show you as below, what every single exe is doing, it’s registry … [Read more...]
What is using all my RAM?
Have you ever had the situation where memory is disappearing and you don’t know where it is being used? Which program is using the memory, and is it paged out to disk or in RAM? That’s where RAMMAP comes in. It’s a great utility from the Sysinternals Team at Microsoft. Here’s an example of how I’ve used RAMMAP to diagnose things. Below you see a system … [Read more...]
How can I figure out those error codes?
You see it all over the place, in text based logs, windows event logs, everywhere. I’m talking about error codes such as 0x8007005. But what do they really mean and how can I find out more about them? You could try Google of course, but that might give you a heap or misdirected answers that don’t apply to your situation. Instead, let’s find out more about what the error … [Read more...]