WinTasks Pro 5 Review - Taking A Look At WinTasks Pro 5

WinTasks Pro is intended to be an advanced version of the Task Manager provided by Windows, and it shows. These screenshots are taken from an IBM ThinkPad X31 running Windows XP Service Pack 2.

You get a list of processes, the executable it is associated with, the process' priority, CPU usage, memory usage, and when the process was started. What Task Manager doesn't give you by default is a thread count, and most importantly, the description of the task selected. You can see that WinTasks Pro also identifies what each process is if it can. The description given is the same as what is given if you clicked on the Process Lib in the toolbar.

This information is vital for taking a detailed look at the processes running on a system. Benchmarkers and overclockers who are looking to squeeze every last cycle and 3DMark immediately go to Task Manager and start to forcefully kill processes that show up. The reason they do this is to save on context switches--the more processes that are running, the more switches that have to be done to prevent starvation, and the more time that the CPU spends *not* running the benchmark.

For example, here's a description of one of the processes that is commonly asked about:

While an overclocker might take their chances with killing this process given this information, the description is detailed enough to deter killing the process at random. The user now knows to think twice. To the right of the descriptions given, there is a small text field available so that comments can be left. This is useful if you know what a process is that WinTasks can't identify and want to remind yourself of the purpose of that process. Other than that, I can't see any good use for it.

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