The Windows Task Manager isn’t always the greatest tool to use for managing system processes. I personally use Task Killer to easily kill tasks, but if you want a more detailed look at what tasks are doing on your computer, then I’d recommend giving Process Explorer a try.

A good example of what Process Explorer can do is that it can let you know what programs have handles on certain devices or files. Say you have a portable device with the drive letter “N”. Just go to Find and “Find Handle or DLL…” Then type in the drive letter, in this case “N:”, and it will find what is using that drive. Also, if you are wondering what is preventing you from deleting a specific file, you could do a search for that file and it will tell what programs are currently accessing it. (SearchWinComputing)

One feature that I really like is that it shows you trees of the currently running processes. You could kill a whole tree if you really need to. One way that I use this is to kill the Last.fm program that always starts up every time I run Winamp. Last.fm has two programs running, and all I have to do is kill the tree to kill both programs.

If you like Process Explorer, then you could even set it to replace the Task Manager. I haven’t tried it out because I do not want to take it that far, but I do have it set to minimize to the system tray for later use. The system tray icon will show a mini graph of your current CPU usage, and if you roll your mouse over it there will be an indicator as to what is using the most CPU.

There are other more advanced features, but I’ll leave that for you to figure out. Process Explorer is a free download for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.