The Process Context Menu

Process Explorer

The Process Context Menu

When you have a process selected the items in the Process menu become active. You can access the same menu items by right-clicking on a process. The items enable you to do the following:

Bring to Front: select this option to bring any windows owned by the selected process to the foreground.

Set Priority: you can change the base priority of a process with this submenu. When you change the base priority of a process the system adjusts the priorities of threads within the process so that they remain at the same relative priority with respect to the new base priority.

Set Affinity: on systems with multiple CPUs this menu item lets you bind the threads of a process to particular CPUs.

Debug: choosing this menu item launches the debugger registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug with the selected process as the command-line argument.

Launch Depends: if Process Explorer finds the Dependency Walker tool (see http://www.dependencywalker.com) with the selected process as the argument. The Dependency Walker tool shows static DLL dependencies.

Kill: this item terminates a process with the Terminate Process API. Note that a process terminated in this way is not warned of its termination and therefore does not write unsaved data it may have.

Kill Process Tree: if the process pane is in the process tree sorting mode this menu item is available and allows you to kill a process and all of its descendants.

Suspend: if you want a process to become temporarily inactive, so that a system resource such as network, CPU or disk, becomes available for other processes, you can suspend the process. Suspended processes show in a dark grey color. To resume a suspended process chose the Resume item from the process context menu.

Restart: when you select this item Process Explorer terminates the highlighted process and starts the same image using the same command-line arguments. Note that the new instance may fail to run or behave differently if the original process ran in a different user account or had a different environment.

Properties: this selection opens a property dialog that shows you more information about a process.

Search Online: selecting this entry will result in Process Explorer launching the system's configured Internet browser and initiating an Internet search for the selected process' name.