Ready, Aye, Ready

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx

On my Amiga, I used a program called SnoopDOS extensively while trying to figure out what was happening on the computer. One of the features I particularly liked was the ability to monitor file reads so I could see why some programs would blow up or what they were attemping to read or modify.

On Windows PCs, random disk access seems to be a common issue. You'll be doing nothing and suddenly the computer will go into a mad fit of disk thrashing. When this is happening it would sure be nice to have a tool like SnoopDOS to figure out what's going on. Well, yes, there is. It's actually been around for seven versions (I'm a trifle slow learning some of these things) and it's called FileMon. Developed by SysInternals and bought by Microsoft a little while back, FileMon is one of a number of small tools for monitoring what's going on inside the computer (the others I used are DiskMon and RegMon. Even better, they're free. So, for once, a big thank you to Microsoft for making a useful tool available and not charging for it!

I do note that FileMon and RegMon have now been replaced by ProcessMon but I've not moved to it yet. Give me time...