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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, Open Source, Troubleshooting, Windows x64

Keep an eye on your system's vitals with Yet Another Process Monitor

Fans of the ribbon interface who want a full-featured alternative to task manager, check out Yet Another Process Monitor.

Apart from showing task manager-esque information about running processes, YAPM also provides details about Windows services and your network activity. The system information panel provides realtime monitoring of processor, memory, and disk activity. Service startup types can be managed, processor affinities specified, and there's a grayed-out option for limiting CPU usage that will likely be active in a future version.

Don't recognize a specific process (say, for example igfxpers.exe)? Highlight it and click the internet search button to be taken directly to Google's results for clarification. You can also put YAPM's Kung Fu to use monitoring remote machines on your network.

In all honesty, there's so much built in to YAPM that you really need to download it and give it a try - assuming you want a better system monitor.

YAPM is free, requires no installation, and open source to boot. I won't go so far as to call it completely portable (the .Net 2.0 framework is required), but I'm all for applications that don't make me click through a setup.

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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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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