Task Manager Replacement..

As many Computer users know, the Task Manager is an essential piece of software. It is great for a quick glance to see how your system is performing, if there is a hung application, a memory leak, or a program is just eating up your system.

There are some limitations to it though, you get just very general information that may not help in your diagnosing problems. If you wish that Task Manager had more punch, have I got news for you.

This program does exist. Free Task Manager by Extensoft can be described as Task Manager on steroids.

Not only do you get the CPU and Memory statistics in the performance tab, you also get the Disk I/O information, to quickly gauge why your drive is tapping away while you are not even doing anything.

Another reality in this interconnected world of always on network connectivity is monitoring what application is talking to what and where. Instead of having to run NetStat or another tool, just go to the newly added Ports tab and get all the updated NetStat information. Great information if you feel there is something going on to slow or even compromise your network speed.

Some other features per their website:

Extended Task Manager features:

• Displays disk input/output activity with information about related applications
• Displays network port activity with IP addresses of external computers
• Displays information about applications that utilized most of the CPU or memory at any time presented on the charts
• Displays all files locked by a select process.
• Finds all processes locking a specified file.
• Includes “Summary” tab for quickly assessing the overall state of the Windows system
• Allows freezing individual Windows processes
• Offer various visual and functional improvements over the standard Windows Task Manager

Now the installation is pretty self explanatory, just a straight default install. The first thing that I recommend when launching it for the first time is to head to the Options and enable the replace Windows Task Manager, this way you don’t have to go and find and launch the application, you can now get it the normal route you take to launch the task manager. Personally, I right click the task bar and go to Task Manager.

Some other really handy features include the Freeze process option. How will this help me you ask? Well say you are running a backup or virus scan, and you need to work on something quickly. Do you want to stop and have to restart whichever process? Me personally, no. With this tool, you can now go to the process in the list. Click on it and freeze it. When you are done, you can now go back and resume it. It will continue like it didn’t miss a beat.

Task Manager can be found here. Give it a try, I think you will be happy you did.