It's usually pretty obvious when one of your Windows applications goes rogue and starts consuming more resources than it should. Your system becomes sluggish and unresponsive,

Usage Monitor is a small, free program that allows you to watch processes for excessive use of memory and GDI/user objects. Set a target on a process - say, 300Mb memory on Firefox - and Usage Monitor can alert you a number of different ways. You can choose system tray popups, message boxes, flash the UM taskbar icon, or even launch a task when an alert takes place.

Pair it with a simple batch file like this one that lets you send Twitter updates from the command prompt, and you've got a handy way to receive remote alerts when something goes awry.

If you'd prefer an app that goes a bit beyond monitoring and alerts, Process Lasso might be just the thing for you.