I often scan my list of running processes in Task Manager to see whether anything new has been installed and is running. I know that when things are about right, my system will settle down to 79 processes with no applications running.
Go ahead, call me a geek (I am a career software engineer), but I like to know what everything is and why it's there. It's part of a long-term strategy for keeping Windows stable and lean that really works. I even run a series of scheduled TaskList commands every day that log results to files, so that I can compare from day to day if I'm not quite sure what's changed. But this can take time.
I also occasionally run the SysInternals program Autoruns by Bruce Russinovich and look for new stuff that's been installed. With this tool I've disabled most stuff that starts up, actually. Every application seems to think it needs to install and run half a dozen helpful little background processes to be Really Useful. For example, many applications come with self-updaters, but now Avast's software update manager does that job, so those self-updaters can often be disabled. I prefer to put off updates to when they make sense rather than when some application gets around to checking anyway.
Given that Windows has a lot of processes that start, run a little while, and exit gracefully if they're not needed, it occurred to me that a little help from Avast with my ongoing maintenance scan might be nice... Maybe Avast could watch the running processes for me, and provide me a report I could generate on demand listing processes that have been seen running substantially all the time - ideally annotated with identifying information, and separable/sortable by manufacturer (e.g., so processes from one company, e.g., Microsoft or Adobe, could be sorted/grouped together.
What I'm looking for is some kind of simplification of the running process overview I do - a check from day to day that would ultimately allow me to see at a glance what processes are running now that weren't running before. Maybe a list with a graph showing when processes were seen running.
Note that I have not installed anything from Avast but the three shields and the software update manager, so maybe it's possible Avast already does something very much like this with the right options installed ("grimefighter"?). If so I should love to hear about it. Even with Avast I opt for a conservative approach and DON'T choose to run every bell and whistle (Avast included) unless I know I need it.
-Noel
