I am quite fond of troubleshooting tools and usually have a lot of opportunities to use those. ProcessActivityView is sister utility to OpenedFilesView and unlike latter (or overpowered Process Monitor) is made to trace file activity of single process.
What it does
On launch app prompts to choose currently running process and starts to monitor its file activity.
Interface is typical for Nirsoft software – minimalistic and with numerous columns that can be toggled and used for sorting.
App adds index by order of files accessed so is very good for detecting specific patterns of files used together.
Resource usage
Narrow focus allows software to be extremely efficient. Processor overhead is very low and prolonged usage doesn’t consume excessive memory.
Overall
Simple, efficient, works without installation and perfect for anything from tracing those elusive profile-specific application settings to virus activity.
Home&download http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/process_activity_view.html
Entry for Best WordPress Design Award
Consolidating email accounts
Everything – fast and powerful file search utility
MDownloader – download manager for file hosting sites
Sharing files with HTTP File Server
WinSCP – file manager for secure transfers
Two sites (and one app) to figure out file extensions
eMule – remnant of old school ed2k file sharing
Brooks Younce Duplicate File Finder – light portable utility
Tabbles – non-standard take on file management
Can’t wait to get home and try this one out. I had a call over the weekend (perhaps it was 2 weekends ago, I can’t remember), where a friend had the xp-police-av virus. Locked the taskbar and ran under a different name as well. Took me a few days but I managed to track it down and delete everything relating to it in the end. This would have made the whole process much easier as I knew the process name, I just didn’t know what it was working with.
I worked with a few of the Nirsoft networking tools, but I never really spent any time browsing around the website. I never realized how many different apps were available. Thanks for this post!
@Angelo
I can definitely relate to the “I wish I had this app” feeling. :)
While Sysinternals has some awesome general purpose troubleshooting utilities Nirsoft excels at simple single-function ones. Site definitely worth exploring, which I often do.
I love tools by Nirsoft, their driver viewer is excellent as is their usb device viewer. Not seen this one before though I’ll give it a go,
@Jonny
Yeah, need to do a post on USB one. Didn’t actually use driver one, soooo many of those utils. :) Need to check it out.