Process Hacker: A Complete Task Management Tool for Windows

Pressing Cntrl+Shift+Esc on your Windows 7 computer launches the Windows Task Manager – one of the best process analyzing tool in Windows. It displays the active process, threads, and services running on your computer. However some times, the Windows task manager doesn’t actually list all the services running behind the scenes. You may be worried about the performance of your computer and may want to find out if it has been degraded over time. In this case, you need an application that can tell you which service on your computer in consuming most of the CPU resources.

If you are running virtual machines and virtual servers, then you need to understand the CPU usage of these applications. Process Hacker is designed with a simple user interface, which lists all the processes in a tree structure – which gives you a better understanding of nested processes as well.

Process Hacker: Overview and Features

The console has three tabs under the menu, namely “Process”, “Services” and “Network” – giving you the system utilization under each department. It is quite easy for any average person to understand this upon close inspection. The best part of Process Hacker is that it displays the process in a tree structure. You can terminate the complete thread with a single click.

Here are some of the features of Process Hacker:

Shows complete set of services running on your computer.
Gives you control over the tasks and processes.
Gives you information on the network connection through the “Network” tab.
Gives you control over the threads that are controlled by rootkits and security applications.
Allows you to terminate and end the hidden processes.
Easy DLL injection and unloading.

Process Hacker provides a detailed process statistics and performance graphs, click the “System and Information” tab, and you can see the statistics in the form of active graphs. Also as a bonus, it displays process tool tips and shows context-specific information. Just hover over any process, and it displays its context.

You can manage network connections using Process hacker as well. There are options to view network connection, disable network and supports ping to another machine.

The Windows Task Manager may be able to do many things for you, but in order to extend its features, the Process Hacker can be really handy. Moreover, if you are running older versions of Windows such as XP, where the Task manager is subjected to frequent crashes, then Process Hacker can be useful as well as it can help you disable all unwanted threads being executed.

Download Process Hacker for free here.