Often when you are troubleshooting what is going wrong with your Windows box you are left to your own devices to guess what is running and what is screwing up.  In the Linux world you can grep and get a view of what processes are running using Process Identifier, or more commonly known as PID or process ID.  Here is how to get that same functionality in Windows.

PID is a unique number tagged with each processes running on a system, and used by most operating systems to identify a process.  This comes in handy when, let’s say Lotus Notes crashes on you and you want to see what other services were started by nlnotes.exe so that you can kill them.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to use Task Manager. Task Manager does not display PID information by default.

To display the PID field in Task Manager, go to the Processes tab, click on the View menu, then click on Select Columns.

In the Select Columns or Select Process Page Columns dialog, place a checkmark in the  checkbox for PID (Process Identifier), and click OK.

You will now see the PID column in your Task Manager.

Tags | General, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows XP