Replace Task Manager with Process Explorer

Sysinternals is a useful website created and maintained by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. You might remember Mark as the guy who broke the Sony rootkit story. They have created some amazing freeware utilities and tools for Windows. Two of my favorites are PsExec, which allows you to run processes on remote machines, and Process Explorer, which is a replacement for Window's built-in Task Manager.

Process Explorer can and should be configured to completely replace the Task Manager. It provides much more information about the processes running on your computer as well as CPU activity history and allocated memory. Killing processes and changing priority are easily and quickly handled. Process Explorer also shows open handles and DLL and memory-mapped files for each process. This can help you quickly find which process has a file or directory locked.

These guys have made some really great tools and they are giving them away for free. Every one of their apps that I have tried is high quality and extremely useful. They provide source code for several of their tools, and Mark's Blog is also a wonderful resource for system administrators and users.