There are tons of task management apps available for free but Process Hacker seems to be the most feature rich and popular among PC users. The best part of the application is that it’s portable and thus can be used from a removable drive on multiple computers without installation.

Why use another Task Management Program ?

Process hacker provides some unique features which are not present in the default Windows task manager. Some of the important features are listed below:

• View a hierarchical tree view of running processes – not present in Windows task manager.
• Restart a particular process, without ending it and running it manually from command prompt or from “New Task”
• More control on the affinity and priority of a process.
• View process heaps, DEP status and other environment variables.
• Use different methods to terminate running processes.
• Bypass different forms of process protection.

There are more features too, if you are a power user and want more control on how the running processes are handled, how much memory is allocated to each program and other parameters. Process Hacker is the way to go.

Usage

Once you have downloaded the package, extract it and open the X86 or X64 folder – this depends on the ID of your operating system. Then double-click the ProcessHacker.exe file to launch the Process Hacker task management window. Here is how it looks like:

Managing Running Processes

All the running process are listed in the process tab in a tree view – thus listing all the sub processes in hierarchical manner. Right clicking a process gives you some useful options -

• Changing the process priority – high, normal, low, real-time, above normal, below normal and idle.
• Terminate the active process or the whole process tree
• Bring the application window to front, minimize, maximize or restore it.
• Changing the affinity controls – determining which CPU threads are allowed to execute the process.
• Create a process dump file
• Run the process for a separate user, determine the I/O priority or completely detach it from the debugger

The best part is the “Properties” window which shows a graphical view of the process performance. You can know the memory consumption and CPU performance for a particular process, along with the Input Output threads the process is currently handling. This feature is not available in default Windows task manager.

Another advantage of using Process Hacker is that you can know which applications will immediately close if you terminate a system process. This is because all the applications or programs using that process will be listed in the tree view.

The Services Tab

The services tab shows a list of Windows services installed on your computer. Most of these services are either drivers or important updates installed from Microsoft Update.

There are some useful pieces of information available next to each service.  Here are some common examples:

• You can know the exact installation path of a running service by right clicking a service -> properties -> Binary path
• Know whether the service auto starts with Windows or not – from the “Start Type”
• Know for which user account the service is triggered.
• Know whether the service is a driver, a shared process or a registered Microsoft service.
• Which DLL files are associated with the concerned service.
• Which permissions are granted to the running service – switch to the “Security” tab and check the “System Permissions” section.

All these details are not shown in Windows task manager, if you are really interested in knowing the inner details of running Windows services – Process Hacker will not disappoint you.

The Network Tab

One of the most impressive features of Process Hacker is the ability to know detailed information about incoming and outgoing network connections. You get to know about the network protocol associated with a particular process, which local address or remote address the process is using, what is the current state and the remote port of the running process.

The details get updated in real-time and whenever the state of a process changes – a highlight is automatically reflected, an example is shown below

This is very useful when you want to know which programs are transferring data to the internet through your computer’s network connection.

There are other useful features as well, this includes searching for a process by name, viewing the pagefile history, showing all the hidden processes or filtering file handles and shared DLL’s. This program is definitely not for novice users, geeks will find it extremely useful.

What’s your favorite task management utility for Windows? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

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Sometimes the application may need a little nudge, sometimes it needs to be assassinated. Process Assassin is a tiny little application (368 KB) can be run from just about anywhere.

Download

1. Download the zip file containing the application from Process Assassin’s website.

2. You will need to unzip the file to use the application. You can choose a spot where you want it to extract to. I chose my 4 gb USB drive. There will be a picture, the app and a readme doc.

How it works

When you start Process Assassin, you are greeted by a simply laid out window.

You will see 5 tabs across the top and several buttons in each tab. The buttons are labeled with popular applications such as Microsoft Office programs, web browsers, OS apps and others like Launchy, Nero and Thunderbird.

If the application is not running the button is grayed out. Once you start Firefox for example, the button comes to life and allows you to click it.

Let’s say Launchy is being stubborn and unresponsive. If Process Assassin is not running, open it up and navigate to the Other Applications tab. The Launchy button should be lit up. All you have to do is click the button and Launchy is terminated.

Other apps

What if you the program you need to close is not one of the default buttons? Well, in the top right corner, there is a big button that says Assassinate.

When you click the button, an Explorer style window pops up. You will need to navigate to the folder where the .exe file for the unresponsive program is.

When you find the .exe file, highlight it and click the Open button.

When you pull the proverbial “trigger”, the application is instantly closed.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a big time saver. Process Assassin has two that make killing an application a bit easier.

Ctrl + W – brings the Assassin window to the front of all other open applications. Doing this allows you to click on one if the default application buttons.

Ctrl + A – opens the Assassination explorer window. This is the same as clicking the button in the top right of the Assassin window.

Conclusion

The application does exactly what it says it does. The simplicity of it makes using it a snap. When you are already a bit stressed because you have to close an application and probably redo a some of the work you just did, it is a good thing you have a straightforward app to use.

A similar application was reviewed a while ago here on MTE. Take a look at Kill, it is a remake of a Linux app.

What other applications do you use to kill an unresponsive program?

intro image: kevindooley

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And even that doesn’t stop OS X from throwing that annoying beach ball icon at you right when you’re at your most productive phase of the day?

If the answer to that is yes, read on!

Mac OS X normally is a pretty good multi tasking operating system but like all operating systems, OS X also has it’s limits and while it tries to make maximum use of the RAM and CPU power available to it (and multiple cores, if you’re using a grand central enabled application), there will always be times when you have to face the beach ball.

All current generation of Macs come with a fairly generous amount of RAM so running out of RAM is not that real a problem and if an application still needs to use more RAM than a certain threshold, the operating system’s swap and memory management routines kick in to handle that.

CPU cycles, on the other hand, are always in short supply. If you’re into any kind of multimedia creation or editing, you’d know what I mean.

So, what exactly are your options when an application you’re running starts consuming the CPU like there’s no tomorrow ?

Well, the first option is pretty straightforward. Find the errant application and close it. You can find the CPU usage of all applications by looking at the Activity Monitor.

To kill an application just select it and click the Red Quit Process button. Can’t be easier than that !

The only problem with this approach is that you lose whatever tasks you were doing in that application and there really is no way to get them back unless the application itself has a feature to save your tasks and resume.

But, it turns out that there is another way to deal with this problem.

Mac OS X provides a method by which you can “pause” an application instead of quitting it and then later when you want to get back to it, continue running the application from exactly the point where you left it.

The first thing that you’d need is the process identifier (PID) of the particular process that you want to pause. This is the number given in the first column of the Activity Monitor window. Note down this number. We’ll be using it pretty soon.

Now fire up the Terminal application (From the Applications->Utilities folder) and use the kill command as shown in the screenshot below

Most people think that the Kill command is only used to kill a process on Unix based systems. But, the fact is that this command can be used to send any OS defined signal to an application and STOP is one such signal that Mac OS X defines. What it does is that it stops (or pauses) whatever tasks the applications is performing and takes away control of the CPU from it. Your tasks are still kept in memory and are safe.

kill -STOP <PID>

You can check the status of the process in the Activity Monitor and it should be consuming 0% of the CPU now.

When you’re done with your work and want to get back to the paused process, just use the same kill command to pass another signal, CONT this time, to the process using the same PID that you used earlier.

kill -CONT <PID>

That’s it. You have successfully paused and restarted a process on Mac OS X. You can now happily continue with your work as if nothing ever happened.

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