This will keep Process Monitor visible even when AutoCAD takes focus. If you have a single monitor, position and size Process Monitor so that you can see the AutoCAD command line and then click the Options menu in Process Monitor and select “Always on Top”. If you have dual monitors, place Process Monitor on the opposite monitor from where AutoCAD opens. This will instruct Process Monitor to ignore everything unless it contains “acad”. At the top of the dialog choose “Process Name”, “Contains”, then in the blank area enter “acad.exe”, then press the “Add” button. Press Ctrl+L to open the filter dialog again. Begin by filtering out all other file activity. Let’s say your AutoCAD takes a long time to start up. Now that you have seen what this tool does, how can you use it to find out what is slowing you down? may be working away even though they seem idle.
Things like virus checkers, media players, email applications, etc. Even if it seems like your computer is idle, there may still be quite a lot of file activity happening. Now, depending on what applications you have running, you will see a variety of file activity going on. For now, don’t change anything, just press OK. Here you can include, exclude, and highlight certain strings. The first thing you should see is the “Process Monitor Filter” dialog. Run the executable (procmon.exe) to get started. An executable, a help file, and the EULA.
You can unzip the contents to a flash drive if you want it to be portable or you can simply unzip it into a local directory like %userprofile%\ProcessMonitor.
After you download the program), unzip the contents. Process Monitor and most of the other “sysinternals” tools are simple yet powerful, require no installation, very small in size, and best of all, free.
Process Monitor was originally developed and released (as FileMon) by Winternals Software, however in July 2006, Microsoft acquired Winternals Software and now Process Monitor and other similar tools are available at Many times you can spot a missing file or path that your application is looking for. I’ve been using Process Monitor (previously known as FileMon) for years to view file activity in real-time. So how can you find out what is going on behind the scenes? Windows and windows applications like to search for things for what seems like an eternity. If you have already ruled out typical suspects such as a virus, spyware, malware, hardware limitations, etc., then there is a good chance that maybe the application is simply looking for something that isn’t there.
Do you have an application such as AutoCAD that is displaying any of the following symptoms?