Best Free Software 09: Task Managers

System Explorer Portable

This is the portable version of the installable Taskmanagers System Explorer. When you start system explorer (the first time), it asks if it should make a security scan of running processes & compares them to an online database. The results can be viewed in a browser. The security scan can also be started by clicking the Security Scan button. You can view tasks, autorun programs, services, drivers, the paths of opened programs, IE add-ons among other things. By right-clicking on individual processes, you get access to many options. You can end, restart, suspend, find file/folder details, the start-up status or let it be checked out by Virustotal.com or virusscan.jotti.org. This enables you to identify, locate & know how to deal with suspicious & potentially dangerous programs that your PC might be harboring. There is a graphic presentation showing processor & RAM usage. Lots of other system information is accessible via the [+] tab making this much better than the Window's own Task Manager.

From publisher

• Detailed information about Tasks, Processes, Modules, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files.
• Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal, Jotti service or our File Database.
• Easy monitoring of processes activities and System changes.
• Usage graphs of important System resources.
• Tray Hint with detailed System and Battery status
• WMI Browser and System Additional Info
• Multilanguage Support

SystemExplorer is FREE for personal and commercial use! Requires operating system Windows XP,Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Get System Explorer:

http://systemexplorer.net/download.php

Alternatives

• DTaskManager

  obviously, is a Task-Manager, but specifically engineered to give additional functionalities that the Windows bundled TaskManager (and other third party products) do not have

  Get it from http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

• PROCESS EXPLORER – PORTABLE TASK MANAGER

  This is what is said of it at pendriveapps.com:

  Process Explorer is a system task manager that can be used to Kill Running Tasks or Kill Running Processes that normally refuse to be killed. Process Explorer can also be used to display which running programs have a particular file or directory open. It can also display information about which handles and DLLs processes have loaded. This application requires 3.48MB of free disk space to be installed.

  Read more & get it from http://www.pendriveapps.com/process-explorer/ or here: http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/ProcessExplorer.zip & get more info here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx.

  In the latter case, after unzipping, in case you want it "portable", just place the whole folder on a USB flash drive. I have deliberately featured portable task managers, because one can easily use them on other PCs, something which I often do. To fully access all features, you need to have administrative rights.