I was invited by LIUtilities to take a look over version 4 of WinTasks Professional a few weeks ago. At first I was my usual overly critical self, and I wanted to find as many flaws in the product as possible as I always do, in order to show you guys there are two sides to every product. Turns out that this product is about as one sided as the broad side of a barn, and over the last twenty or so days I have found myself spending more and more time tinkering with and in awe of this program.

The package from Sweden was on my doorstep when I returned home from a workout one day. I opened it and found a very nice CD case with a CD and a detailed instruction booklet. Immediately I popped it into my CDROM and loaded it up. It prompted to install for me, and it did so... in less than 5 seconds (!!!).  This program leaves an extremely small footprint for the things it can do for you. The minimum System Requirements required are:

• Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• 10MB free hard disc capacity
• 32MB Ram
• Pentium 200Mhz

Key features from LIUtilities

When the program loads you are greeted by the screen below. There is a whole heck of a lot you can do with this program; just looking at the main screen the first time I loaded it made me want to really master this program because it can do some really, really cool stuff. See where I wrote the "Personal Note" ? Well you can write notes on every different executable that is running, and save them corresponding to that executable- a handy tool at that.

Before we go into everything this program can do, let's go over all the menu options presented

If I right click on a running program, I get the following menu. You can choose several options for each process, including stopping it, resetting it's name, and increasing or decreasing it's priority.

I can also select a process and use the menu bar at the top to view it's description, windows, modules, statistics, scripting, and logging. You can also search for a process that is running if you have a long list and want to save time, by using part of it's name in the search box and you are taken right to the process.

If we click on the "Statistics" button, yet another amazingly cool screen comes up. We can view the CPU and mem usage on a 1 min, 10 min, 2 hour, or 24 hour scale. See that vertical red line? That is my mouse, I can move the mouse horizontally across the graph, and in the lower left it will tell me what time and day that particular point is TO THE SECOND. It tells me what the CPU and mem usage were. This is like super task manager.

Equally as impressive, when you click the modules button you are shown all the .DLL (direct link library) files that the program is using to run. Word uses many, and to keep the size reasonable I decided not to show them all. Click it to blow it up.

I can view an event log as well See what I have to go through for you fine folks? :) The first 10 minutes of the creation of this review, as shown in a process log. The final one had several thousand entries in it ;)

Autostart button shows you all the programs that are automatically started when you load Windows. Another handy feature! At this point, it doesn't suprise me, I am becoming a Wintask Fanboy ;)

Here are some cool white papers I found...

Find and remove Spyware and Trojans Yourself

This is another example of the thousands of things you can do with this program, just wanted to share it in this review.

"WinTasks 4 lists all processes running on your computer, including invisible background processes like spywares. Since WinTasks also assigns more user-friendly names to each process (e.g. Internet Explorer instead of iexplore.exe) as well as the full executable path, finding and terminating spyware processes is relatively easy."

It's in the white paper, here.

How to reduce frame-skipping and stutter when playing DivX Movies!

"While a modern computer should easily be able to handle high resolution video playback, skipped frames and visual artifacts are not uncommon. The main reason for this is that the CPU has to deal with more than one task at a time. By rapidly switching between different tasks, the computers seems to be operating in parallel, but unless you have two CPUs, this is not actually the case. This technique, called multitasking, is usually very efficient and works well with most applications, but with softwares that requires a lot of cpu time and also has to produce a continuous output without dropped frames or audio gaps, it sometimes needs a little help"

This white paper is located here

Ok, so far you may think this program is cool and you are getting into it. Well hold on to your britches, because things are going to get 1000x better with the feature that they are developing that I am about to show you!

Ripped straight from the manual:

"In WinTasks 4 Professional there is a built-in script language that makes it is [sic] easy to create completely new functions and automate the handling of processes and resources. It is possible, for instance, to allow WinTasks to automatically increase the priority level of the defragmentation program, stop all processes using more than 70% of the memory or stop the web browser when visiting a certain site. The scripting works in the background, even when WinTasks is minimized." (page 15)

An few pages are devoted to the scripting instructions, and according to them "While scripting is a very powerful feature, it is also dangerous if used incorrectly. You should be very careful when writing scripts and make sure that the logic is correct before you enable the script."  So if you are an illogical person, don't even try it ;)

Unfortunately, the scripting language is still under developement. They are taking requests from users to put in the final version of it, and if you get WinTasks you will receive the scripting language for free.

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