phillhutt

Well, after watching episode 404 of Hak5, I went and had a look at some of the tools they used in that episode. They all seem to be free, and they all seem to do what they do very well. The ones I had a look at in particular were process monitor and process explorer. Process explorer in particular seems very handy. It is a very detailed version of task manager basically. It lets you drill down and see exactly what is running and where it is running. For example, many of the processes running are running as services, but a few were running as a process started by explorer. It also gives you decent descriptions of what each of the processes are. If you want to get detailed, you can double click to see the properties. I had a look at my FireFox and found that it has used 30 minutes of kernel time and I could see each of the individual threads it had running and how much CPU time they each used, in real time. This is probably far far too much detail for 99% of users, but if you are trying to debug a program and you are wondering what is eating up CPU or memory or something, it could be pretty handy.

Also, I recommend watching that episode of Hak5, if not all of their episodes. They use those tools to have a look at what a few viruses do to your machine, and how they can be useful to try and stop them (your probably fucked if you get one/some of those viruses).