Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware
Task Killer: End pesky Windows tasks without opening Task Manager
by Brad Linder Nov 13th 2007 at 6:00PM
If you're like most Download Squad readers, you've probably got a few dozen windows open on your computer at any time. And when your system locks up, it's not always easy to tell exactly which process is the offender. If you're using Windows, usually you have to do a Ctrl+Alt+Del, pull up Windows Task Manager, and search the processes bar for applications using an unusually large amount of memory. But there might be a simpler way.
Task Killer is a tiny little app that sits in your taskbar. It lets you pull up a list of open windows and/or open processes without using Windows Task Manager. A single right or left click on any running process is all it takes to kill it. While the installer file weighs in at just over 300KB, Task Killer does somewhat ironically take up over 2MB of RAM on our Vista machine.
[via Lifehacker]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jerome said 6:07PM on 11-13-2007
Heh. I like how you said "When your system locks up" and not "If".
Apple rules!
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Tiger said 7:18PM on 11-13-2007
or just Ctrl-Shift-Esc, click, End Task... if you really need to go to the process itself its only one more click in Vista, just choose the task and then Go To Process, works great.
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kojo87 said 10:18PM on 11-13-2007
first off: shut up Jerome.
second off: i really like Process Explorer. i run it in the background with the CPU usage graph always displayed in the system tray. then there is the individual graphs for the processes. its really super useful. and if that crashes (its only happened to me once) you can open up another instance!
i believe that i downloaded it after reading a DLS article. thanks!
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Stuart Halliday said 2:56PM on 11-14-2007
Not everyone knows the technical name for the process that's dead.
Give me Process Explorer (PE) everytime. You just drag the target icon over the offending program and it is highlighted in PE. Then a quick rightclick - restart gets the task killed and restarted.
All my machines uses this.
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James said 5:08PM on 11-19-2007
Yeah, MS should really start replacing the Task Manager with PE. Just like they upgraded Windows Explorer every couple of platform iterations, I think Task Manager is past due for a facelift, and PE provides just the extra kick needed. They own it now, right? So what's stopping them?
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