Daphne: Drag and drop process explorer

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Daphne: Drag and drop process explorer

by Brad Linder Apr 25th 2008

If you need to kill a process in Windows, or just try to figure out which program is using up all of your precious system resources, all you have to do is open the Windows Task Manager. But what if you want to kill a non-responsive program, but you can't figure out where it is in the Task Manager? Sometimes the process names don't seem to bear any resemblance to program names.

Daphne solves this problem, by letting you drag and drop a little crosshair onto any running program on your PC. At its most basic level, Daphne lets you figure out which process goes with which program by highlighting the process in a list of running processes.

But you can also use Daphne to kill running programs, hide applications, or killing every process with the same name. Daphne would be worth checking out for its highly configurable task manager alone. But the drag and drop function is what makes this free utility really killer.

[via Lifehacker]

Tags: daphne, kill, processes, task-manager

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

zkam said 4:43PM on 4-25-2008

FYI, Process Explorer and PrcView both have the drag-and-drop crosshair tool. PrcView also has a command line version (pv.exe) which can also be used to kill multiple processes at once, like "pv -k -f fire*.exe"

As for hiding apps or making them transparent, my hotkey manager does that (Hoekey).

Not dissin' Daphne... (Haven't tried it myself yet). Just pointing out alternatives

Herny said 11:02AM on 4-27-2008

BUT, Daphne is Open Source and Process Explorer isn't. This makes a big difference to me.

Barry Cleave said 4:56PM on 4-25-2008

I think Daphne is a really useful addition to your Portable Freeware Toolbox, I use it all the time.
You will find a nice detailed review of Daphne plus comments from the developer and a follow up on the latest review here:
http://proreviewer.com/2008/02/13/daphne-modify-control-kill-processes-with-your-mouse/

Barry Cleave

Barry Cleave said 5:03PM on 4-25-2008

Crazylink said 10:14PM on 4-25-2008

I've been using Daphne for a while now but I never realized this feature.

hazard said 8:37AM on 4-26-2008

Looks interesting .. good post.

FYI .. check out the context sensitive menu [right click] in the Task Manager's Applications Tab for operations such as "Switch To", "Bring to Front", "Minimize", "Maximize", "Go to Process" etc .. many of which also work on groups of programs by multi-selecting them in the list.

mg said 5:27PM on 5-08-2008

Task Killer is faster and safer:
http://www.rsdsoft.com/task_killer/index.php4

I'm just missing the Drag'n'Kill option with outlining the windows. Maybe some can do a similar tool in AutoIt! oder AutHotkey.

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