ProcessActivityView

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on March 03, 2009

ProcessActivityView is supposed to give you a summary of the files and folders being accessed by a specific process. But thanks to its extremely confusing and poorly designed user interface, we had a difficult time discerning the information being fed to us.

The user interface appears as two separate windows. The first window displays all of your system's active processes, and the second window displays the file and folder access summary for a selected process. The first few times we made a process selection, nothing happened. A visit to the Help menu only offered us a link to the publisher's site, which didn't give us the information we needed. We were finally able to locate a process that displayed access info, but most of it ran off the page, which made it hard to navigate. We were able to view the different file names being accessed, the open and close counts, read and write counts and bytes, and the opened by modules. That being said, most novices aren't going to have a clue as to what any of this information means, especially the way this program displays it, and without any kind of user guidance.

The program is free, so if you need a program that displays process access information, it's worth taking a gander, but we suggest less-experienced users stay away from ProcessActivityView.