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Task-Manager posts

Filed under: Productivity, Beta, Web

Remember the Milk task manager exits beta in meaningless gesture

Remember The MilkFour years after the service opened to the public, popular web-based task manager Remember The Milk is finally out of beta. What does that mean? Nothing really.

The company isn't going to start charging for access to its core services. And the developers aren't done adding and refining features. It's just that after four years, the Remember The Milk team decided the product was probably robust enough to remove the beta label... you know, kind of like Google did with Gmail not too long ago.

Of course, companies like Google and Remember the Milk have stretched the meaning of the beta label beyond any semblance of recognition. Once upon a time, if you were using a beta product you knew it was a pre-release version that hadn't been extensively tested and which may be unstable. These days, alpha is kind of the new beta, although some companies still release public and private beta versions of software that are still untested and unstable. Since there's no regulator tasked with enforcing alpha, beta, and other labeling rules, the words have kind of lost their meaning.

Still, congratulations to the Remember the Milk team on reaching four years!

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Auslogics releases free, portable task manager alternative


There are plenty of good reasons to keep a good Task Manager alternative on your flash drive -- like when some nasty malware has disabled access to Windows' native one. We've mentioned some options before on DownloadSquad, and now there's a new one to add to the mix.

Auslogics has just released a free, fully portable app that will only take up a scant 1.7Mb of space on your drive. ATM provides information about applications, processes, services, and open files. Apart from displaying processor and ram usage, disk and internet throughput, the context menu provides quick access to plenty of task-related kung fu.

For starters, there's the option to look up a process or service on Auslogics' online FileInspect. The service provides helpful information like who the developer is, where the file ought to be located, its default attributes, and user comments about the file.

You can also end a process or temporarily freeze it, adjust CPU affinity and priority, and locate the file on your hard drive. ATM's tools menu also provides quick access to important Windows screens like services, computer management, performance monitor, and control panel.

Grab the free download of Auslogics Task Manager and sock it away on your flash drive. It's well worth keeping around just in case.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Windows x64

Get alerts when apps become resource-hungry with Usage Monitor


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.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Blue Task Manager for Windows XP or Vista

Blue Task Manager
There are plenty of applications out there that will make the Windows Task Manager more useful or replace it altogether. Blue Task Manager isn't one of them. All this little utility does is change the default color of the graphs and text from green to blue.

The effect gives you a slightly more calming way of figuring out why your PC has suddenly become so sluggish.

If you just want to give Blue Task Manager a try, download and decompress the installation folder and then click on the executable task manager. If you want to permanently replace the default Windows Task Manager, you'll need to run the included Replacer application which lets you replace the default windows utility with the blue version.

[via Instant Fundas]

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Google, Web

Google quietly launches Google Tasks

Google Tasks
Update: Well that didn't take long. Apparently Google really hadn't meant to unleash this service on the public just yet, because the URL no longer works.

Google has, without any fanfare, apparently launched an online task manager application cleverly called Google Tasks. This appears to be a more fleshed out version of the Gmail Tasks widget that showed up in Gmail Labs a few months ago. And the services are linked. If you create a task in one application, it will show up in the other. In fact, it's possible that Google Tasks is little more than the backend for the Gmail Tasks widget, but it does offer a decent way to create and manage tasks from one location.

You can nest tasks within one another, and add notes to any task. You can also set due dates and check off tasks when they're completed. Users can create, edit, and delete multiple task lists. But only the default list will be shared with your Gmail account.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Yawffer monitors, safely freezes Windows processes

Yawffer
Yawffer is a utility for Windows that monitors the time and your computers CPU, memory, and disk usage. You can set it to show some or all of this information in the corner of your computer display, and you can easily adjust the font, size, and color of the text.

And that's all mildly useful. But the really cool thing you can do with Yawffer is freeze a running process without closing the program. In other words, if you have a runaway process that's slowing down your system, or you're trying to figure out which process is causing problems, you can pause them with Yawffer.

In order to freeze a process, just right click on the Yawffer icon in your system tray and click the "freeze a process" option. Then just locate a process and click the freeze button. The program won't exit, but it will become unresponsive and its CPU usage should drop until you click the unfreeze button.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Monitor and close inactive Windows tasks with JustCloseSomeTasks

JustCloseSomeTasks
JustCloseSomeTasks is one of those rare utilities that does exactly what you think it would. It closes some tasks, but not all of them.

The free Windows program monitors all of your running programs. And if you haven't used one of those apps in a while it gets added to the list of programs that JustCloseSomeTasks will kill when you press a hotkey. You can also manually select or deselect tasks to close by opening the main program window.

The program detects inactivity based on whether you've actually clicked on a program or input text or interact with it in another way. In other words, if you're listening to music in the background while doing other things, your media player will likely get added to the list of inactive tasks which will be closed if you just start hitting your hotkey.

Fortunately, you can right click on any running process and choose to exclude it from the current session or all sessions. If you want to remove a program from the whitelist, just open up the settings.ini file in the installation folder and remove the process name from the whitelist section.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Extended Task manager for Windows

Extended Task Manager
Extended Task Manager shows you everything that the built in Windows Task Manager does... and then some. This free utility offers a summary page which shows you al ist of running programs as well as a graph with your CPU usage, Page file usage, disk I/O use and network performance, among other things. And that's just in the first tab. The program has 8 separate tabs that provide detailed information about exactly what your computer is doing while you aren't paying attention (or even when you are).

The performance tab, for example, offers a more detailed look at your CPU, Memory, and Disk I/O usage and history. The graphs are similar to what you'd find in the Windows Task Manager, but the Disk I/O graph is a helpful addition. And when you mouse over any point in a graph you get details including which running processes are using the highest percentage of your resources at any given second.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity

MiniTask - light task manager for Adobe Air

MiniTaskMiniTask is a basic cross-platform organization app built on Adobe Air. The learning curve on this app is basically nil, and you'll soon be adding, checking off, and setting alarms for to-do items with ease. There aren't a ton of features, so it's not the greatest for the completely neurotic among us, but if you just need a simple, unfussy to-do list, give it a look.

Let's a take a quick look at what MiniTask can do (fortunately, it's not much!). There's just one window, and you can right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) to add new tasks and new dividers. You can use the dividers however you like, for different days or different categories of tasks. To-do items have three modes: checked off, not checked off, and alarm. Double-click a task to change the name, and double-click an alarm icon to change the time on an alarm. Seriously, that's all there is to it!

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Power up the Windows Task Manager with Task Manager Extension

Task Manager Extension
The Windows Task Manager gives you a good idea of which programs are running and how much RAM they're using. And if you need to kill a runaway process, few things work better than calling up the Task manager and clicking the End Process button. But if you want a more thorough look at what each process is doing, you're probably better off using a separate tool like Process Explorer.

Or you could install a third party addon like Task Manager Extension, which supercharges the default Task Manager. Once Task Manager Extension is installed, you'll start to notice changes in the Processes tab of the Windows Task Manager. First up, there'll be icons next to selected processes, making it easier to figure out which application that process is associated with. Windows system processes will also be grayed out so you know not to muck with them unless you really know what you're doing.

But more importantly, when you right-click on a process, you'll have about 3 times as many options as before. Probably the most useful optionare the Informaiton and Properties boxes, which display things like the system path (where the program is installed on the hard disk), and how long each process has been running for.

In order to install Task Manager Extension, you'll need to register for a CodeProject account, which takes just a few seconds. But you do have to give up your email address.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Task2Gather: Online task manager with mobile clients coming soon

Task2Gather
Vito Technology is probably best known for developing software for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones and PDAs. But the company has just made the jump into a new arena: web apps. First up is an online task manager called Task2Gather.

The interface is clean and easy to use, if not entirely intuitive. It took me a few moments to figure out how to name new tasks or projects, for example (you type in the Name & description box, but it wasn't immediately clear that the light blue area was a text box). You can either see a list of all your tasks from multiple projects at once, or you can browse tasks using a tree mode, which lets you pick a project and look at your finished and unfinished tasks and sub-tasks. You can also invite other users to share your task list.

Overall Task2Gather is useful if you want to keep your task list online and accessible from any computer, but there are other task managers out there that accomplish this as well or better. Vito has an ace up its sleeve though: the company plans to release a Windows Mobile and iPhone version of Task2Gather soon. These mobile clients will likely not only let you create and manage tasks while you're on the go, but also synchronize them with the web client.

Task2Gather is free to use. Eventually Vito plans to offer a subscription-based premium version with access to additional features like RSS feeds for task updates and the ability to upload file attachments for tasks.

[via My Today Screen]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

ProcesQuicklink identifies links beween processes and programs

ProcessQuickLink
If your computer is running slowly or a program has stopped responding, you can fire up the Windows Task Manager, identify the runaway process, and kill it. That works fine when the process is clearly labeled with a name like firefox.exe or digsby.exe. But what do you do with rapimgr.exe or hpqste08.exe?

ProcessQuicklink is a free add-on for Windows Task manage that helps you figure out which program a process is associated with. Because the last thing you want to do is kill the wrong process and reboot your PC when all you wanted to do was stop your media player from blasting music at you.

Once ProcessQuicklink is installed, you'll notice little information icons next to each process int he Task Manager. Click on any icon and you'll be taken to a Uniblue Process Library web site where you can read more about the process in question. It'd be nice if the information was instantly available without opening a new web page, but we'll take what we can get. ProcessQuicklink does save you the few seconds you'd otherwise spend typing a process name into Google.

[via MakeUseOf]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Daphne: Drag and drop process explorer

Daphne
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]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

ProcX shows you which Windows services can be safely terminated

ProcX
The Windows task manager might show you a list of running processes, but it does a pretty poor job of letting you know what some of those processes are actually doing. You don't need a Ph.D, to figure out what will happen if you terminate firefox.exe because it's using up 100% of your CPU cycles, but what about spudsvc.exe?

ProcX is a free utility that will show a list of running processes also shows you which applications they're associated with. Sometimes that information might not be particularly helpful, such as when you find out that an process is associated with "services" or "explorer." But it might help you figure out if ending a process will end an application you didn't mean to kill.

You can also use ProcX to show network access, display DLLs loaded by a process, and delete, rename, or suspend/resume a process or DLL. You can also use the program to search for a process name using Google.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Process Manager 2 Lite: What's really going on with your PC?

process Manager 2 Lite
We find that the task managers Microsoft bundles with Windows usually gets the job done if you just need to terminate a running process or see which application is eating up all of your RAM. But we're still kind of smitten by Process Manager 2 Lite, an enhanced process explorer.

This little application is a free replacement for the built-in Windows task manager. You can either set it to coexist with the default task manager, or you can check a box under "Windows Integration" in the settings to make Process Manager 2 Lite the default utility that runs when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del.

The application shows you running tasks, like you would expect. But you can also click on a process and select "show dependency" to see related processes. Unlike Windows Task Manager, there's also a log file, which can come in handy, and as an added bonus you get the option of editing your Windows startup applications from within Process Manager 2 Lite. It's also a lot prettier than Windows Task Manager or the also-free Process Explorer from SysInternals.

[WinBeta]

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