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processes posts

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: Mozilla, Browsers

Soon each Firefox tab will be treated as a separate process

Firefox Electrolysis
One of the coolest features in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 is the way the web browsers treats each open tab or window as a separate process. That means if one tab crashes, the browser won't necessarily close. Plugins like Adobe Flash can also fail without crashing the browser.

Mozilla is working on bringing a similar feature to Firefox. It's not ready for prime time yet, and it won't be included in Firefox 3.5, which is due out any day now. But Chris Jones, one of the people working on the project, has posted a short video that shows an early version of the project (codenamed Electrolysis) in action. As an added bonus, if you click that link in Firefox 3.5 RC2, you'll be able to watch the video in your browser without any plugins.

The video shows what happens when a page goes bad and a process is terminated and restarted. Electrolysis should be ready for general consumption in mid-July.

[via Mozilla Links]

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, Microsoft

Control Freaks: Tell Apps Which CPU Core To Use


SMP Seesaw is a small, simple application that gives you full control over your dual-core processor Windows system. Select a running process, click the move button, and you can quickly divide your active tasks between your cores any way you see fit. Sure, Windows is supposed to do this manually, but some of us would rather make it happen ourselves, thanks.

A pro version (still free) is available and offers support for up to 32 cores. If you're only running a dual-core, don't bother with it. You can't select multiple tasks and move them all at once as in the basic version. If you do have a plethora of cores, though, get it - you can move a task to a specific core or as many cores as you care to check off.

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

Task Killer: End pesky Windows tasks without opening Task Manager

Task KillerIf 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]

Filed under: Security, Video

Prune your startup processes with Sysinfo.org

Sysinfo.orgSysinfo.org has a great database of programs that might start running when you boot your computer, and each is tagged according to the following scheme:

  • Y - Normally leave to run at start-up
  • N - Not required - typically infrequently used tasks that can be started manually if necessary
  • U - User's choice - depends whether a user deems it necessary
  • X - Definitely not required - typically viruses, spyware, adware and "resource hogs"
  • ? - Unknown

So, if your computer seems a little sluggish lately or if you think something funky is going on when you boot, check the list. Skipt to the bottom of the page for some tips on figuring out what's running and disabling the bad stuff.

[Via Lifehacker]

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