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
So what can this program do for you? Let's open it up and I will show you what's "under the hood". When you open up Wintasks, you are greeted by a splash screen as it loads and it puts an icon in the system tray.
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 ;)
