winsiderss/systeminformer

System Informer is a free Windows utility for monitoring what is happening inside a computer. The README describes it as a tool that watches system resources, helps with debugging software, and assists in detecting malware. It is published by Winsider Seminars and Solutions, Inc., and the project is the successor to an older tool that the README still references by name under download statistics, called Process Hacker. It runs on Windows 10 or later, on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. The features list is the bulk of the README. It promises a detailed overview of system activity with color highlighting, graphs and statistics that let users find processes that are using too many resources, and a way to discover which process is holding a file open when Windows refuses to let you edit or delete it. It can show which programs have active network connections, with the option to close those connections. It reports on disk access in real time. It can display detailed stack traces, including kernel-mode code, code running through Windows' WOW64 compatibility layer for 32-bit programs, and .NET code. It exposes service management beyond what the built-in services.msc console offers, allowing services to be created, edited, and controlled. The program is small, portable, and needs no installation, and is released as free software under the MIT license. The build section is short. The project requires Visual Studio 2022 or later, which can be downloaded as the free Community Edition. After cloning the repository, a script called build_init.cmd in the build folder sets up dependencies; it only needs to run again when tools or third-party libraries change. Then build_release.cmd compiles the project, or developers can open SystemInformer.sln and Plugins.sln inside Visual Studio. A separate readme inside the build directory has more detail for troubleshooting. Bugs and feature requests are tracked on GitHub Issues. The README ends with a small but practical tip for running the program from a USB stick: create an empty file named SystemInformer.exe.settings.xml in the same folder as the executable, and the program will store its settings there instead of in the user's profile. Step-by-step Windows Explorer instructions are included, with a reminder to first turn off the option that hides known file extensions, so that the new file actually ends in .xml rather than .xml.txt.