Task Manager Extension

August 14, 2004

Shamelessly stolen from Scott Hanselman's most excellent Ultimate Developer Tools List, Task Manager Extension is one of my favorite new addins.

Like Notepad, Task Manager is something I use on a daily basis: it's an essential part of my toolkit. I took a look at some replacements, but I'm so used to Taskman at this point, I can't retrain myself. And with Task Manager Extension, I don't have to; it adds all the "missing" features you could possibly want:

• Shows application icons in Processes list
• Shows services in a different color
• Find files in use by any process (* shows all files in use)
• Find modules in use by any process (full text search)
• Shows process id in Applications tab
• Use different color for processes using lots of CPU time
• Query list of files, handles, modules, windows used by a given process
• Close a used file, or unlock an exclusively opened file for deletion
• Press the Delete key to kill a process or a service

Highly recommended; I put it in the startup group so it's always loaded and can auto-attach to taskman.exe on demand. You'll know it's working when you see (extended) appended to the title of the window, and the Extension menu.