Doesn't time fly when you're having fun? We were about to reference a column we wrote "a few weeks ago," but it turns out we actually wrote it in 2004! That must mean we're having lots of fun.

In that column we discussed the wonders of a free utility called Process Explorer, which is not only a replacement for the very limited and rather sad Windows Task Manager, but also provides a lot of useful information about what is going on under the hood.

The company that published that tool, Sysinternals, is now owned by Microsoft and a much improved version of Process Explorer can be found on the Microsoft Sysinternals Web site.

We just discovered a similar tool for people struggling with Windows systems: What's Running, published by Christer Fahlgren. What's Running works with Windows 2000, XP and 2003, and is very ambitious in its efforts to extract as much information as possible from a Windows system.

For the most part, What's Running uses a two-column layout. The left column lists six views -- Processes, Services, Modules, IP Connections, Drivers and Startup -- and provides a set of snapshot functions that save the currently discovered data in an XML format. You also can reload previous snapshots and compare them with the current snapshot to show only the differences.