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Coding Horror
programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood

August 14, 2004

Task Manager Extension

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

Task Manager Extension screenshot

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.

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Comments

Oh my God, I was always looking for something like that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks you so much!

Hermann Klinke on August 14, 2004 04:31 AM

Just found this, and it really is brilliant.

Y'know Jeff, you should also do a list of developer tools you use - I found out about Beyond Compare from your blog, and just saw this mentioned, and am sure you can recommend a lot of other useful tools.

M. on May 25, 2006 09:19 AM

Well, I've since switched to Process Explorer:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000162.html

Jeff Atwood on May 25, 2006 09:31 AM

Another great extension is PRIO. You can use both but you lose the priority save function.

Anon on July 19, 2006 02:12 AM







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