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While Process Hacker is meant to look and work a little more like the built-in Task Manager, being easy to approach for regular users, it actually has many of the same features as the popular and powerful Process Explorer that we all know and love.

So what makes me switch to Process Hacker and make it my default Task Manager replacement? I have discussed the four most important features below.

Complete Control Over Every Process And Service

Right-click any process and you will find bunch of advanced options to control the process, you can terminate it, suspend it, restart it or reduce working set. Then there are further options in the context menu that allow you to select affinity, create dump file, run terminator, set priority, run as different user, search information about the process on online, and more.

Monitor CPU And Memory Usage From The System Tray

You can select Process Hacker to run in the system tray from Options. Then navigate toView > Tray Icons and select CPU History and Physical Memory History. Now you can watch their usage live from the system tray. Hover your mouse pointer over them and you will get additional details.

After short listing four Task Managers(that are free), we compared their performance, functionality, and ease-of-use. They are Process Explorer, Process Hacker, System Explorer, and Resource Monitor.

addictivetips.com have conducted tests, and they say:

After rigorous testing, we choose Process Hacker to be the perfect task manager replacement(read the review here). And surprisingly it is the only opensource advanced task manager available today.

Summary

I like Process Hacker but it takes a lot of memory (in my case 50 Mb, luckily I’ve got 4Gb RAM running at 64 bits). Sysinternals’ Process Explorer needs only half the memory (around 20 MB) and starts faster too. I would use YAPM (Yet Another (remote) Process Manager) but it too suffers from a slow start and uses up quite a big chunk of memory. Could be this is due to the use of the .NET Framework, who knows?

Another way of improving your task manage would be to pimp the good old one that comes with windows. There are a few plug-ins like Prio, Extended Task Manager or ProcessQuickLink.

Some people just want their system to be more responsive and they use a task manager exclusively to terminate processes, especially before playing games. These people should take a long look at Process Lasso.

Overall, despite it needs more memory I will continue use it. It has better GUI and more powerful. It can start discreetly when windows starts and will automatically minimize to the task bar – that’s something I don’t see from the others.

Downloads

• Download Process Explorer
• Process Hacker [SourceForge via Download Squad]

References:

• http://tinyurl.com/yfztc34

• http://tinyurl.com/y99kr2e