A silent Windows background utility that watches every process on your system, logs exits, flags crashes, and explains what went wrong — in plain English.
ProcessMonitor runs invisibly in your system tray and tracks every program that opens and closes on your PC. When something crashes, it tells you why — not just an obscure exit code, but an actual explanation and what you can do about it.
- 📋 Logs every process exit to a daily
.logfile - 🚨 Flags crashes (non-zero exit codes) to a separate
errors_log - 🧠 Explains crashes in plain English — e.g. "The program tried to read memory it doesn't own. Usually a bad mod, plugin, or driver conflict."
- 👪 Identifies the parent process that launched the crashed program
- 🔔 Balloon notification when a crash is detected (mute-able, persists across restarts)
- 🖥️ System tray icon so you always know it's running
- 🔇 Runs completely silently — no console window
Real entries from a single day's log — background task failures, Chrome updater errors, Windows auth timeouts, and a Path of Exile hard crash with annotated exit codes.
- Clone or download this repo
- Double-click
Start-Monitor.bat - A green circle appears in your system tray — you're running
- Double-click
View-Logs.batto see today's logs - Right-click the tray icon → Stop Monitor to quit
Requirements: Windows 10/11, PowerShell 5.1 (built-in). No install needed.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
ProcessMonitor.ps1 |
The monitor itself |
Start-Monitor.bat |
Starts the monitor silently (no console window) |
Start-Monitor.vbs |
VBScript launcher used by the .bat to hide the window |
Stop-Monitor.bat |
Gracefully stops the monitor |
View-Logs.bat |
Opens today's log in Notepad |
Diagnose-Monitor.bat |
Troubleshooting tool — runs visibly so you can see errors |
Test-RunVisible.bat |
Runs the script in a visible console for debugging |
Convert-Log.ps1 |
Utility to convert/filter existing log files |
Logs are saved to %USERPROFILE%\ProcessMonitorLogs\
[HH:mm:ss] TAG | PID: ###### | Exit: CODE | ProcessName [spawned by: Parent (PID)]
why --> Plain-English explanation of what the crash means.
See the Log Format wiki page for full details and exit code reference.
Full documentation lives in the Wiki:
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| Installation | How to set up and run for the first time |
| Usage | Starting, stopping, and viewing logs |
| Log Format | What the log entries mean, with real examples |
| Tray Icon | Tray icon features, mute, and right-click menu |
| Troubleshooting | Common problems and fixes |
| File Reference | Every file in the repo explained |
I am not a programmer. I have the ideas and the use cases — Claude (Anthropic's AI) writes the code. I describe what I want, we work through it together, and Claude handles the PowerShell implementation and debugging.
Everything is tested on my real system. The crash logs in the screenshot above are genuine — including three Path of Exile crashes that we traced back to NVIDIA's nvngx_update.exe interfering with the game's rendering pipeline.
If you have ideas or questions, head to Discussions — no technical knowledge needed.
- 💡 Ideas & feature requests → Discussions → Ideas
- 🐛 Bug reports → Issues
- 🙏 Questions → Discussions → Q&A
MIT — do whatever you like with it.