by Rick Glos7. September 2011 18:32We just received new laptops at work and now we need to migrate our files from one machine to another. I have a few rather large virtual PC disks that I needed to transfer. I was using robocopy to transfer the files from one laptop to the other over my home network and noticed some severe latency on my source laptop. I was trying to do productive work on the source laptop and every mouse click or keystroke seemed to lag one or two seconds making it too painful.
I had already spawned the robocopy process though and it was 20% through moving multiple files and I didn’t want to stop it and restart it. So, “how do you pause a running process”? A google search landed me on a page that talked about PsSuspend and using it to pause a running process.
I used Process Explorer, another favorite from sysinternals, to identify the process id of the running application to suspend.
Then using the pssuspend tool I was able to pause the copy so I could work.
I then later in the day restarted the process.
You could see in the properties of process in process explorer when the copying started up again that it was copying the file at 2.0 MB per second.
This could come in handy for all kinds of processes to pause and then restart.