'What Process?' Blog

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2008-05-13T22:04:00.002+01:00

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Repeat Comments Solved

2006-12-06T10:05:00.000Z

I noticed recently that a lot of the time comments would be repeated, twice, maybe three times quite often. It puzzled me for quite a while why this was happening.

Then I posted a comment myself the other day and realised what was happening. My ever reliable web host (well, you can rely on them to ensure things that did work don't continue to work) was not processing a piece of code as it had done before, which meant when a comment was posted, an error screen appeared. So I figure users were seeing the error, using the back button and posting again. Despite the error, the comments were being posted.

I've sorted that out now so hopefully no more repeat comments!

Mind your language

2006-11-06T19:01:00.000Z

Occasionally you get comments posted to the site from people disgruntled that there isn't an answer to their specific problem and protesting that there are adverts on the site.

So to clarify:

1) I don't provide the answers. I provide the facilities for people to share their knowledge. Thousands and thousands of useful comments have been posted from well meaning people. Unfortunately, not every process has the information that people want - that's just the way it is.
2) A lot of work went into the website and the application, which is completely free. A few adverts on the along the way help me make a living.

There was one particularly foul mouthed comment posted recently, which I will quote here:

what the fuck is it? all u r doing is trying to sell wintask pro
fuck off prick

Posted by Fuck off

I was intrigued as to the identity of this charming poster, so took a look at the IP address - 161.85.127.139. I performed a trace route on it and it turns out that IP is an internal IP address from the electronics company, Philips. I wonder if their corporate internet policy allows the posting of obscene messages to internet sites. I know the Dutch are open minded but thats strong language in my book and I don't think I'll be getting my new TV from them.

List Processes From A Command Prompt

2006-10-24T21:33:00.000+01:00

Someone was asking me recently how to list the running processes from the command line (start->run->cmd.exe).

I did a bit of reading and there seems to be two main ways of achieving this.

Tasklist.exe
Tasklist is a neat little command line util in Windows XP Professional that will list all the running processes. But it has some extra functionality that is really cool. People often see svchost.exe running with multiple instances, read on What Process or other sites that this process spawns other processes or services and aren't sure which ones, because Task Manager doesn't give much away. By using the command "tasklist.exe /svc", a list of tasks is outputted to the screen AND their associated services. So you can see what service each svchost.exe was responsible for.

WMI
Windows Management Instrumentation is a great tool for controlling and extracting information from your PC. It forms the basis of the work behind What-Process, which is not particularly complicated. wmic.exe is the command line tool for leveraging WMI.

Basic Command
WMIC process get caption 'caption is the name of the process

Extending the Command
WMIC process get caption, commandline 'commandline tells you the path to the executable on your PC

There's lots of other information you can get about the processes that are running. Find out the list of switches available to you by typing this command

WMIC process get /?

So there we have it: two nice and easy ways to get information about your currently running processes from the command line!

Design Refresh

2006-09-23T17:32:00.000+01:00

I've spent a bit time over last couple of days trying to refresh the look of What-Process.com, which was starting to look a little bit dated.

Changes Made:

New logo designed
Key menu items moved to horizontal bar
Onsite Advertising reduced and made less prominent
Layout simplified
Some "web 2.0 style" shaders

I'm still working on getting this blogger template to work with the new look, so it looks a bit rough round the edges now, but hopefully the changes will be seen as an improvment.

Short downtime

2006-08-19T11:46:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the short downtime this morning. Had to fiddle about the with the websites hosting package so the website was inaccessible for about 20 minutes.

Not enough answers!

2006-02-09T11:09:00.000Z

I received this email from Winnie:

I am a little confused, please can you tell me how I can find the answers to any questions raised? at the moment I can only find the questions and NOT the answers.

Hi Winnie. 'What Process?' is a website designed to allow Windows processes be explained and demystified, with a primary aim or saying what a process actually is. We currently have thousands of processes listed, and over 4000 user contributions. Some of those contributions are questions, many are answers or explanations. But all the contributions come from the website users, and I'm afraid if nobody has answered questions you have about specific processes, then that's unfortunate but probably means the collective users of the site do not know the answer or have not seen the question.

I think your specific issue related to lucallbackproxy.exe. This has been identified on the site as being "part of the Live Update process of Norton anti-virus". If you're having problems with it and can't find answers online, you might need to contact Symantec and see if they can answer your question or problem.

Not much on DLLs is there?

2006-02-08T11:25:00.000Z

I received this email from a guy called Stephen:

splain why the dll's are listed as nothing results from their hyperlink except the same page for any dll dlicked on.

I think what Stephen means is why is there not more information about the DLLs listed, and just a message saying "Sorry, no comments yet".

All of the processes and DLLs listed on "What Process?" have been added by its users. Similarly, they have provided all the comments and knowledge which have helped make this hopefully a useful resource.

The DLL aspect of the site was added more recently as a kind of bright idea for extending the functionality of the site, and whilst lots of DLLs have been added, comments about the DLLs have been slower in coming forward than on the .exes. I imagine the reason for this is that it more people know about .exe files and have an idea of what they do, or notice when they have a rogue one, because they see them listed in Task Manager, or even the What Process? application. And it's fairly easy to understand that when you terminate a process, an application might suddenly close on your screen. DLLs are a bit more of a mystery for most users, I'd guess.

So that is why a lot of the DLL information pages are as yet unpopulated with comments, although i have just modified the page to hopefully explain why that is.

Hope that answers your question Stephen!

The mysterious SVCHost

2006-02-03T22:55:00.000Z

I received this email from a kind visitor to the website:

I have battled for years trying to figure out what all of the processes are, your site has really helped. My latest problem results from constantly changing processes which appear at random and I'm sure are Microsoft processes interrogating my machine. I don't mind this but would prefer an upfront approach with an official program and even a request to keep it running. Why all of my protection processes ignore these processes is also suspicious.
SVCHOST is still a mystery and a similar site or mechanism to identify DLL's would be a major boon.
Thanks for a phenomenally useful tool.

Thanks for your email, Jack - much appreciated. You're right - SVCHost can be very mystifying. I think I read somewhere on the site there are tools that will tell you which DLL is behind it, so maybe someone can post a reply on here with any further info.

And if not, I'll have to try and build it into a future version of What Process, if there is one.

Click Online is now just... Click

2006-01-30T22:50:00.000Z

One of the best pieces of media exposure that this website has received is when it was featured on the BBC's Click Online programme last summer.

They were talking about how you can identify what's running on your PC and said of What-Process, "A better and slightly more user-friendly [than Sysinternal's Process Explorer] way to look at what is running on your machine is What Process?"

As a fan of Sysinternal's Process Explorer, I was very flattered by the comparison and eternally grateful to the guys at Click Online which is broadcast around the world.

Well, now Click Online is just... Click. Check out the website to find out more about the programme.

What Process across the network

2006-01-28T18:00:00.000Z

Since I made What Process?, I have received a fair few emails about it and I've always got the impression that bulk of users just use the What Process? software on their own PC.

But one of the main benefits that I wrote into the program was the ability to monitor and terminate the processes on remote computers across a network, and I'd really be be interested to know if anyone uses that feature and finds it useful?

I probably explained elsewhere but I first had the notion of writing a tool for remotely killing processes when I was in an IT support job in London and we had these visitors come over from the New York office and they had to access their Lotus Notes email. I'm not a Notes guru, and only vaguely remember, but if the user had left their session open back at New York, they weren't able to login whilst they were in London. This meant having to wait 5 or 6 hours for the IT staff at the New York office to get into work and asking them to shut down the user's PC . So the idea born of some kind of script or tool that could connect to a target PC, list the processes and terminate them - nlnotes.exe in this case.

There are remote process killers - there was even one in the MS Windows resource kit - but many required something to be installed and running on the target machine before they would. The tool I made made use of WMI which was already running on all the machines.

So there you go... a little bit of an insight into the development of the What Process? app. Let me know how it's helped you in a networked environment! (Or maybe it hasn't! Let me know that too!)

What Process? Blog

2006-01-23T12:26:00.000Z

Welcome to the new What Process? Blog.

This will be a place where I can talk about things that are happening with the website, with the What Process? application and also the wider subject of maintaining a stable Windows environment on your PC.

This will be an opportunity for me to engage with the users of the site and work to make a better site based on their feedback.