Lets face it - the default Task Manager (taskmgr.exe) in Windows 2000/XP is of very limited calibre and doesn’t display a lot of critical information - like the originating path of a process, parent-child relationships between processes and specially the DLLs used by each process. All this information really comes in handy when dealing with misbehaving processes as well as for development and debugging of Windows based applications.
Trying to gather all that information involves continuous hopping between Task Manager, Services Explorer and several other applications and can get very frustrating in the long run.
Thus, the search for a free but more powerful task manager alternative brought me upon two great tools …
Both the tools are packed with features, though Process Explorer (by Sysinternals software, which was bought over by Microsoft) is the more powerful one.
Process Viewer:
This one can act as a replacement for users with beginner and/or intermediate computing skills and won’t take you on an information overload trip. It’s really compact & light-weight, the disk footprint being approximately 850KB and loads far faster than the standard Task Manager.
The default view is similar to that of Task Manager with a couple extra columns like PID (Process ID), Full Path to the Process executable etc.
