Finding out what a process really is with Pulse by Zaweba

Sooner or later you'll sort the Live table in Pulse by Zaweba and find a name at the top that means nothing to you. It might be using a lot of memory, or writing to the disk, or sending data you didn't expect. Before you decide anything about it, you want to know what it is. Open file location is the quickest way to find out.

How to use it

Select the app's row in the Live table. Then choose Open file location. There are three ways to get to it: the App menu, the right-click menu on the row, or the button above the table. Whichever you use, File Explorer opens on the folder that holds the app's exe.

That's all it does, and it's often all you need. The folder name usually tells the story. A program sitting in a folder named after a company you recognise is one thing. Something in an odd place in your user folder that you don't remember installing is another.

Reading what you find

Pulse already helps before you click. Each row shows the program's icon and a friendly name read from the exe's version resource, so most apps are named sensibly rather than by a bare file name. When that friendly name still doesn't ring a bell, the folder fills in the gaps.

Look at what else is in the folder. Other files with the same company or product name, a readme, or an uninstaller give you a clear idea of what the program belongs to. A folder inside Program Files usually means an installed program. A folder full of files from a game launcher or a printer maker tells you which piece of software brought it along.

If the folder still leaves you unsure, you now have the exe's exact name and location, which is a much better thing to search for than a vague description.

What to do next

Once you know what the program is, you can decide calmly. If it's something you need, leave it alone. A backup tool that reads the whole disk at night is doing its job.

If it's something you don't want running, End task in the same menus closes every process of that app after a red confirmation. That stops it now. It won't stop it coming back next time Windows starts, so if it's a program you no longer use at all, uninstalling it through Windows is the lasting fix.

Using it with the rest of Pulse

Open file location is most useful straight after sorting. Click the CPU, Memory, GPU, Disk or Network column heading to put the biggest user at the top, select it, and open its folder. The table updates in place every second, so your selection doesn't jump away while you work.

It's also a good follow-up to the History page. If the top CPU users or top bandwidth users list for yesterday shows a name you don't recognise, find it in the Live table (the Find box filters by app name) and open its location.

A word of caution

Don't delete files from the folder that opens. Explorer is just showing you where the program lives. Removing pieces of a program by hand can leave it half working and is hard to undo. Use End task to stop it and Windows' own uninstall to remove it.

And don't assume a name is bad because it's unfamiliar. Windows itself and the drivers for your hardware run many programs with plain or technical names. Finding the folder first is exactly how you tell those apart from something you'd rather not have.