>Task manager in Windows is useful,but what about tasklist?
Tasklist is a command line utility in Windows XP Professional(not in Home)onwards.
Let’s say I want to see all the processes and their associated dlls which are running on my Windows box just by using a simple command prompt.I can use tasklist to accomplish that,here is how :
1.Open the beloved Windows command prompt(in XP Pro or Vista).
2.Get the list of all associated modules/dlls for services running on the box.
3.Pipe the output as a cute csv file for viewing.
Command to do all the stuff listed above :
C:UsersAVP>tasklist/M /FO CSV>>C:UsersAVPdllsinacttion.csv
The /M switch lists all the modules belonging to services that are running.
/FO is basically the format,here I have used it as CSV so it can be viewed as a spreadsheet.
Now that I have lots of dlls listed,what to do with it?
Many dlls are orphans as in they hang around with no active processes associated but gobble up cache memory making the box slow.
I can edit the registry so that this can be avoided thereby optimising the system RAM.
How:
Open registry editor – type regedt32 from command prompt to bring it up.
The registry hack for that is editing the following key :
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer
Here,create a new DWORD value named AlwaysUnloadDll (note the capital letters) and assign it a value of 1 as in asking Windows to always unload dlls.
Save the registry changes and reboot once.
Note : This might affect really old programs running on Windows(as in legacy programs) so best to backup the registry first and try out this hack.
Hope this has been an informative and yes somewhat obscure post 🙂
Peace.