When your PC is slow, unstable or otherwise misbehaving then it’s often a good idea to take a closer look at the programs it’s running.

Task Manager will give you a basic view of your system. Tools like Process Explorer and Process Hacker offer more details. But we’ve never seen anything quite as powerful as Device Remover.

This free program doesn’t just list the processes that your PC is running at the moment, for example. It also reports on installed drivers, Windows services, and even includes a Device Manager-like “Devices Tree” to provide a closer look at your hardware.

Whichever module you choose will then provide an enormous amount of information on your active processes. Pick a running program, say, and you can see its current CPU priority, the memory its using (in no less than 20 different measurements), the total amount of CPU time it’s used (handy for identifying resource hogs), when it was launched, whether the process is elevated, the DLLs is has loaded, and the files and Registry keys it has open, amongst many other details.

But Device Remover isn’t just about reporting information: it can perform useful actions on whatever you’re viewing, too.

Maybe you’ve discovered a process that you don’t recognise, for instance. Is it malware? Right-clicking gives you the option to run a web search. If that confirms that you’re infected, another right-click marks the file for deletion at reboot time (handy if you’re unable to delete it now), and a third option will kill the process so it can’t do any more harm.

This would already be more than enough for anybody, but the author has continued to pile in extra functions into every area of the program.

And so you can back up all your running drivers in just a few clicks, for instance, perfect if you need to reinstall them later.

The program can display device filter drivers, and try to detect any that are broken or faulty. Which is extremely useful as these can cause all kinds of odd behaviour. (Ever had a CD or DVD drive disappear from Explorer, or had Windows think it was just a CD/DVD-ROM device, or something similar? A common filter issue.)

And there are tools to help you diagnose power management-related problems, troubleshoot drive issues, understand Windows error codes, and a whole lot more.

Device Remover does have some issues. It’s still a beta, and unsurprisingly (considering its many features) there are still a few bugs. We found it locked up occasionally for no apparent reason, for instance, so we won’t be ditching our copy of Process Hacker just yet.

Many of the options are highly technical, too. You’ll need a fair amount of knowledge to understand what’s going on, and even then you’ll have to be careful. (Accidentally delete some important service or driver and you could render your PC entirely unbootable, even in safe mode.)

There’s an enormous amount of power here, though, and if you’re happy with tools like Process Hacker then you’ll quickly feel at home. So download the program, and let it put your PC under the microscope: it’s surprising just how much you can find out.