Task Manager Extension

Jeff Atwood -

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.