Our friendly and knowledgeable consultants here at the Gearhead Clinic for Those Driven Insane by IT have examined your PC problems, and we’d like to recommend a course of treatment. Our first suggestion is to get rid of the Windows Task Manager.
You might think Task Manager is useful because it tells you what is going on with your software and overall system performance. And when Windows manages to get itself tied up in knots (something that happens with monotonous regularity), Task Manager is usually your last resort by letting you kill off errant applications with extreme prejudice.
Unfortunately Task Manager is not as good as it could be. It doesn’t show you which processes depend on which, its ability to drill down into system and application performance is very limited, and it doesn’t even help you find out where a process was loaded from or who the publisher is.
We’ve played with quite a few task manager replacements, and one of the best we’ve found is Process Explorer from Sysinternals. It is compatible with Windows 9x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003 and 64-bit versions of Windows for x64 processors.
Process Explorer provides a huge amount of detail on what and how Windows processes are running, and makes up for the deficiencies of Task Manager. What’s more, it’s free.
It displays detailed process information, including icons, command line, full image path, memory statistics, user accounts, security attributes, threads used, dependencies, sockets used, application stack contents and more. With Process Explorer you even can examine processor and memory usage at the process level and search all open handles to find which files an application has opened or which applications opened specific files.
Like Task Manager, Process Explorer lets you kill off processes or an entire tree of dependent modules. But because Process Explorer shows you the detailed dependency tree you will be able to avoid those “interesting” experiences that happen when you kill off applications using Task Manager that often result in a system collapse.
You can examine the environment variables associated with a process, close an open handle if you want to (this usually causes applications to break), and examine .Net managed processes.
While you can run Process Explorer alongside Windows Task Manager you also can opt to have Process Explorer replace it. Even though there are a number of commercial products in this category, Process Explorer does it all and for free.
Now with all of these processes coming and going there are some ugly consequences and one of the ugliest is because of programs failing to free memory when they exit. The result is that the system will run progressively slower.
For this condition, the Gearhead Clinic recommends AnalogX MaxMem, which runs under all flavors of Windows. This is an excellent offer from the chaps at AnalogX, and it is also free.
MaxMem forces Windows to keep a specified amount of physical memory available by reclaiming lost memory allocations and forcing idle loaded modules to the disk-based virtual memory. You also can have MaxMem automatically free up system memory when your machine is idle for an extended period – a great service for systems such as servers that are permanently on.
MaxMem resides in the system tray and its icon displays the physical memory utilization for the last 60 seconds as a tiny graph that changes from green to yellow to red as free memory is reduced. When you move your mouse over the icon, a box appears showing how much memory and what percentage of total memory is available.
You can configure the amount of memory MaxMem maintains based on one of three measures. You can select that the system always maintains the specified level or have memory reclaimed after 3 minutes of idling or that MaxMem “aggressively” reclaim memory after 30 minutes of idle memory time. The latter mode will flush almost everything out of memory that isn’t being used.
You also can manually force the memory-reclamation process by left-clicking on the MaxMem icon, or when you are doing something important (like playing City of Heroes), you can disable MaxMem temporarily.
