First of all, I love Process Explorer. If you haven't done so already, stop what you're doing, browse over to http://sysinternals.com (now assimilated by Microsoft TechNet), find and install Process Explorer. This is by far the best process browser and analyzer for Microsoft Windows, especially for the price (free). A few of the screens available in this wonderful tool are shown below:
Now onto the reason for this blog post. Process Explorer has the concept of Column Sets, allowing you to customize the columns, column order and row sort of the main process window. Once customized, the setup can be saved in a Column Set:
This is a fantastic feature. Being a being of multiple PCs (six and counting), I was hoping to be able to share the fruits of my column tuning with >1 of my PCs. Process Explorer doesn't have an "export" function for these column sets, but they've gotta be stored somewhere on my system, but where?
The final answer became obvious, once I used Altiris Software Virtualization Agent (now assimilated by Symantec; Google "SVS 2.0" to find the freeware copy) to create a virtualized layer to trap all changes made by ProcExp.exe. All columns are stored in the Windows Registry under HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\Process Explorer ... right where I would've stored it had I designed the tool:
Exporting the column sets, should you be so inclined, is simply a matter of exporting the registry keys below ColumnSet0 in my example and saving it as a .REG file.
One interesting side note. Being a huge advocate of portable applications (I'm typing this blog via the ScribeFire add-on to Firefox Portable), I actually run ProcExp.exe off of a USB thumb drive. By having column sets stored in the Registry, this means that my column sets do not move with me as I move my thumb drive from system to system. In the grand scheme of things, it'd been slightly more portable to have this information stored in an old-fashioned .INI file in the app directory. It's not a deal breaker, but would've been nice.
Perhaps this [not so] brief blog post will answer the simple question I had when I started my quest a couple hours ago. Enjoy!
Now onto the reason for this blog post. Process Explorer has the concept of Column Sets, allowing you to customize the columns, column order and row sort of the main process window. Once customized, the setup can be saved in a Column Set:
This is a fantastic feature. Being a being of multiple PCs (six and counting), I was hoping to be able to share the fruits of my column tuning with >1 of my PCs. Process Explorer doesn't have an "export" function for these column sets, but they've gotta be stored somewhere on my system, but where?
The final answer became obvious, once I used Altiris Software Virtualization Agent (now assimilated by Symantec; Google "SVS 2.0" to find the freeware copy) to create a virtualized layer to trap all changes made by ProcExp.exe. All columns are stored in the Windows Registry under HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\Process Explorer ... right where I would've stored it had I designed the tool:
Exporting the column sets, should you be so inclined, is simply a matter of exporting the registry keys below ColumnSet0 in my example and saving it as a .REG file.
One interesting side note. Being a huge advocate of portable applications (I'm typing this blog via the ScribeFire add-on to Firefox Portable), I actually run ProcExp.exe off of a USB thumb drive. By having column sets stored in the Registry, this means that my column sets do not move with me as I move my thumb drive from system to system. In the grand scheme of things, it'd been slightly more portable to have this information stored in an old-fashioned .INI file in the app directory. It's not a deal breaker, but would've been nice.
Perhaps this [not so] brief blog post will answer the simple question I had when I started my quest a couple hours ago. Enjoy!
