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Use These Task Manager Alternatives to Better Control Running Applications


steven36

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If you're looking for more control over running applications than the features offered by Windows Task Manager, check out this guide and explore three advanced apps designed for this purpose.

We're breaking down Process Explorer and Process Hacker, which are freeware, along with Process Lasso, which is a commercial product, all specialized in managing processes. Scroll down to the end of this article to play our video guide and see what they look like.

 

Process Explorer

 

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Process Explorer isn't packed in a setup kit, so you can double-click the downloaded .exe file to launch the tool. It autodetects currently running processes and shows them in a tree view at startup, so you can tell which processes depend on others to run.

The names of the processes are shown in the left column, and their information is displayed on the right: CPU usage, Private Bytes, Working Set, PID (process ID), Description, and Company Name.

These are color-coded to tell apart New Objects (green), Deleted Objects (red), Own Processes (light purple), Services (pink), Suspended Processes (grey), Packed Images (dark purple), Relocated DLLsand .NET Processes (yellow), Jobs (brown), and Immersive Processes (blue). To customize these colors, open the Options menu and select Configure Colors.

Select a process from the list and right-click or open the Process menu to view the possible actions. You can control the application's window (Window -> Bring to Front, Restore, Minimize, Maximize, Close), pick the CPU cores allowed for the process (Set Affinity -> tick the CPU boxes, click Ok), as well as allocate and prioritize resources (Set Priority -> Realtime, High, Above Normal, Normal, Below Normal, Background, Idle).

Also, you can terminate the process or just the ones that depend on it (Kill Process or press Del, Kill Process Tree or press Shift+Del), Restart, Resume (if it's suspended), as well as almost instantly scan a process for malware using multiple anti-malware applications online (Check VirusTotal and view the detection ratio in the VirusTotal column, next to Company Name).

To replace Windows Task Manager with Process Explorer, open the Options menu and click Replace Task Manager (administrative rights are required).

 

Process Hacker

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Just like Process Explorer, Process Hacker shows the processes organized in a hierarchical view to show you which ones depend on each other. You can check out the Name, PID, used CPU, I/O total rate, Private bytes, User name that it belongs to, and Description. The status bar reveals the total CPU usage, Physical memory, and Processes.

The highlight colors indicate New objects (green), Removed Objects (red), Own Processes (light yellow), GUI threads (dark yellow), .NET Processes and DLLs (lime), Service Processes and Inheritable handles (light blue), System processes (dark blue), Job processes (brown), 32-bit processes (dark red), Debugged processes (purple), Immersive processes and DLLs (light pink), Packed processes (dark pink), Relocated DLLs (light orange), Elevated processes (dark orange), as well as Suspended processes and threads (grey).

To change these colors, click Options on the toolbar and go to Highlighting tab. To view additional information about a running process, right-click it and select Properties (or press Enter).

To control the processes, right-click an entry from the list to view the menu with available actions: Terminate corresponding application (or press Del), Terminate tree with all processes depending on the selected one (or press Shift+Del), Suspend or Restart the process, set Affinity, Priority and I/O priority (refers to data reading and writing rate on storage devices, can be set to High, Normal, Low or Very Low), and others.

If you hold down Ctrl while clicking to select multiple processes, you can Terminate, Suspend and Resume all of them at once, as well as set the Priority and I/O priority.

To make the tray icon of Process Hacker indicate CPU usage along with the history of CPU, GPU, I/O, Commit charge, Physical memory, Disk,and Network, open the Tools menu, go to Tray icons, and select the type of data that interests you (or activate all).

To replace the Windows Task Manager with Process Hacker, click Options on the toolbar, go to Advanced tab, click Change next to Replace Task Manager with Process Hacker (it's greyed out if you didn't run the tool as administrator), tick the Replace Task Manager with Process Hacker box, then press Ok twice.

Process Lasso

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Process Lasso shows a graph with the Processor Use (red), Responsiveness (green), Process Restraint (yellow), and Memory Load (blue), in addition to bar charts for CPU usage and RAM Load.

All processes are shown by default, but you can switch to the Active processes tab to view only those corresponding to the currently running applications.

The tool reveals a lot of information about each process, such as the User it belongs to, Restraint history, Application name (claimed), Rules, Priority class, CPU affinity, I/O priority, Memory priority, CPU usage,and time, I/O Delta, along with Threads and Handles, among others.

To control a process, right-click it to view the menu with available commands: Priority class (Current and Always), CPU Affinity (Current and Always), I/O Priority (Current and Always), Memory priority (Current and Always), Application power performance (Highest Performance, Balanced, High performance, Power saver), Limit number of instances allowed, Keep running no matter what (restart if terminates), Prevent sleep when running (PC, Display or PC and Display), Trim virtual memory, Restart, Terminate, or Terminate always.

If you want to ask Process Lasso to monitor a specific process and perform actions on special events, select Set watchdog rules for this process from the context menu. You can ask the program to keep an eye on the CPU or Virtual memory (select it from the empty menu next to for, below Process name to monitor).

When it comes to the action it can automatically perform, you can choose from Change CPU affinity, Execute (launch a program), Log occurrence (note the activity to file), Restart the process, Set CPU priority, Set I/O priority, Stop processing rules, Terminate the process, and Trim virtual memory.

The action you specified can be performed by the application when the CPU or Virtual memory is Greater than or Less than a certain level (set Percent value for CPU, or megabytes for Virtual memory) and for a certain amount of time (set the number of Seconds). Click Create new process watchdog rules when you're done. It will be added to the Watchdog entries list, and you can create additional entries with monitoring rules for other processes.

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@steven36, that's 3 very good and detailed progs that you suggest. For me, being a simple noob, I use Autostart and Process Viewer, which shows all the running processes with coloured icons, memory, page file, CPU usage with graph, and autostart progs. It has a very simple clearly designed interface that is uncomplicated and uncluttered. I've been using it for years and have found it a big help in identifying anything that is causing freeze or hang when I'm using my computer.;););)

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While we list all three either directly or indirectly on the FP, there is one more that comes into this list. Personally have tested it, quite good I think.

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54 minutes ago, funkyy said:

@steven36, that's 3 very good and detailed progs that you suggest. For me, being a simple noob, I use Autostart and Process Viewer, which shows all the running processes with coloured icons, memory, page file, CPU usage with graph, and autostart progs. It has a very simple clearly designed interface that is uncomplicated and uncluttered. I've been using it for years and have found it a big help in identifying anything that is causing freeze or hang when I'm using my computer.;););)

I use process lasso for many years  . I use it to blacklist unneeded process from running with out having to really disable them and if i need them i just take them off black list tell I'm done , I also use process lasso power plain and I use it  too see how much process my PC is using . :)

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Personally, I don't see the need for these anymore.  With 32GB of ram there is plenty of room to run all the processes on a modern computer and there are seldom that many running anyway.  For example, I have 23 processes running now and they are using less than 1% of my total memory.  Most processes can be set as manual and will start when needed by a program and it is not necessary to disable them or blacklist them.  There are very few processes that need to start automatically.

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Just now, straycat19 said:

Personally, I don't see the need for these anymore.  With 32GB of ram there is plenty of room to run all the processes on a modern computer and there are seldom that many running anyway.  For example, I have 23 processes running now and they are using less than 1% of my total memory.  Most processes can be set as manual and will start when needed by a program and it is not necessary to disable them or blacklist them.  There are very few processes that need to start automatically.

 

It's not only about RAM though. Some softwares are disk hoggers, some use too much of CPU and many other such things. I found I would have benefited more if I had kept an eye on disk usage of some softwares on my PC here.

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On 6/25/2016 at 0:33 AM, DKT27 said:

 

It's not only about RAM though. Some softwares are disk hoggers, some use too much of CPU and many other such things. I found I would have benefited more if I had kept an eye on disk usage of some softwares on my PC here.

I got programs on Windows that be running as a service that i may use every once in a blue moon when I'm watching videos  or converting something I don’t want unnecessary things eating up my memory and cpu  ,  I have some that are necessary like security  programs I don’t blacklist . There even some programs  that use unneeded process you can just blacklist part of it's process and it don’t even hinder the program from doing what is needed .  Some of the best programs on Windows are not very memory and cpu friendly  the more things you have running in the background the more sluggish  you’re pc becomes . 

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