To hell with Task manager

My cousin bro, who works in Microsoft came over to my place a few days back .. Since he was working under WinXP in M$, I asked him to sort out my unusually and dead-slow computer .. He said that there were a lot of unwanted background programs running .. I tried to act smart .. !! .. I said that I tried closing all stuff in 'task manager' but still the computer is slow .. !! .. and also sometimes the 'explorer.exe' was taking up lots of CPU but I cannot end explorer !! ..

Ok now he laughed .. !! .. He said task-manager was just a eye-wash for script kiddies .. Wtf !! ?? .. Task-manager looks so much like 'professional computer geeky stuff' but actually its just a stupid thing which doesn't even show exact CPU usage .. M$ has another 'hidden-tool' it seems .. This is called 'Process Explorer' .. you can download it here .. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Now Process Explorer is the actual 'task-manager' .. It shows you all the threads and the sub-threads that run on your windows box .. and you can replace your 'task-manager' with this .. how cool !! ..

To hell with the old task-manager .. and Process manager doesn't stop there, it also gives you full details of every process, threads running in your windows box .. just right-click each process to display the full info .. and also you can kill each process or the entire process tree .. this is very useful when some sub-process of explorer is choking your computer .. You don't have to close entire explorer.exe, you can kill that sub-process alone ..


Moreover, when a new process is started, its shown in green and when a process is killed it's shown in red .. this is very useful when some arbit programs run on their own .. you can isolate the program which is being executed without your permission ..

There is more to Process-Explorer but unfortunately I couldn't understand whatever he said to me (it got too technical at this point of time) ..

And ya, he wanted me to read Mark's Blog .. Mark is one of the most techy guy in M$ it seems ..
Check it out at http://blogs.technet.com/MarkRussinovich/