Kerkia

Process Explorer/Viewer

Background

Windows comes with a default process explorer/viewer which is Task Manager. You can activate the application by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESC and see it is already a fairly complete application, especially if you extend the number of columns displayed in the processes view. However, there are a number of other process viewers/explorers that bring additional capabilities such as managing the start-up processes, dealing with locked files, analysing process threads, investigating process dependencies, etc.

Recommendation

Recommending one tool over others is difficult as there are many very strong applications in this area. Our shortlist included: Anvir Task Manager (the free version; flashy UI), What’s Running (nice UI), Process Explorer (great potential), Process Hacker (process specialized) and System Explorer (from Microsoft/SysInternals).

And we ended up with two recommendations. First we recommend System Explorer for the most advanced users, typically software programmers or IT specialists. This tool is very complete and has a very high performance level including a higher refresh rates than all other tools. It will be overwhelming for regular users however.

For more regular users who want a complete feature set without the complexity of our first recommendation, this is where it is not easy to recommend one tool. Anvir Task Manager and What’s Running are both nice, but we prefer the simplicity yet the complete feature set of System Explorer. While its UI is less fancy, we like the organization of the functionalities and this being a fairly new offering we also believe in its future potential.