Great alternatives to Windows Task Manager for monitoring the PC

If you want to know what is going on under the surface of a Windows PC, Task Manager can help. If you want to dig deeper, these alternative utilities provide more detailed views of processes.

Process Explorer

Price: Free | By: Mark Russinovich | Size: 1.8 MB

Process Explorer is one of many advanced tools by Mark Russinovich and all are excellent. This one is an alternative to Task Manager and it provides more information and more tools.

It not only lists running processes, but sub-processes are shown in an expandable tree structure. Task Manager does this too, but there is much more information about each process in this utility.

When Process Explorer is first started, it shows seven columns of information, such as Filename, CPU, Description, Company Name and so on. However, right click a column header and you can choose from around 25 columns of information to show.

Right click an item and the process or the whole process tree can be killed. There is also an option to set one of seven priority levels for processes. These enable you to choose how much CPU time an app or background task has. It is sometimes useful to tweak this to stop a process slowing down the PC or to get a task finished more quickly.

Suspicious programs can be right clicked and sent to VirusTotal to check if they are known malware. That is useful because it is not always obvious what a process is or why it is running.

MiTeC Task Manager Deluxe

Price: Free | By: Michal Mutl | Size: 3 MB

MiTeC Task Manager Deluxe is an excellent replacement for Task Manager and it is packed with features and information. It is perfect for technically knowledgeable users but a novice might be lost.

It starts up displaying a familiar list of processes and it also shows sub-processes in a tree structure. It shows the name, type, CPU usage, date, and description in columns. Right click and there is an option to choose from almost 30 different attributes to show in columns. A lot of information about processes is available.

The Connections sub-tab of the Network tab shows which apps are accessing the internet and what they are connecting to. This is useful if you are trying to work out what a suspicious program is doing or where it might be sending data.

The Disk I/O and Performance tabs show CPU, memory and disk activity as live charts. The amount of information displayed is excellent.

Right click an item and there is an option to monitor it. This opens a second window dedicated to showing information on the selected item. It shows the threads, modules, environment and more. It even shows live scrolling charts with the CPU and memory usage, and disk activity.

There is a lot more to this utility than has been mentioned here and it is recommended that you add it to your toolkit. It is excellent.

Wise System Monitor

Price: Free | By: WiseCleaner | Size: 1.5 MB

At first sight, Wise System Monitor does not impress and it looks like a simpler version of Task Manager with less information. However, it has a great feature that makes it worthwhile having on your computer.

In the bottom right corner of the screen is an optional information bar that shows internet up and download speeds, memory usage, CPU usage and temperature. Click any of these items and it a panel pops up with the details of the processes and programs using the RAM, CPU or internet.

It is so small it does not get in the way and can remain there permanently. It is very useful, but the main task view window is not.

Security Process Explorer

Price: Free | By: Glarysoft | Size: 1.3 MB

Security Process Explorer is one of the simpler tools in this collection but it might suit a non-technical user.

It shows a list of processes that are running along with the CPU and memory usage. Windows Task Manager does that, but what makes this utility unique is the rating for many items.

There is a rating column and many processes show a red/green bar. The amount of red and green indicates how people rate it from a security and usefulness point of view. It can help when you are faced with an unknown process with an obscure name that means nothing.

Many years ago Task Manager used to let you change the priority of processes, but this is no longer possible. Security Process Explorer ads that feature and right clicking processes lets you set it to one of six priority levels. Higher priority programs and processes run faster than lower priority ones, although they use more system resources like CPU time.

Clicking a More information link opens a page in a browser that provides a detailed description of the selected item, and there is a button to search Google for it.

There are some good features in this tool, but in some areas it is lacking the detail found elsewhere.

Process Hacker

Price: Free | By: Wen Jia Liu | Size: 3.2 MB

Process Hacker looks a lot like Process Explorer and there is even a link to the Sysinternals forums in the About info. It seems to be an open source version inspired by Process Explorer.

The home screen is a colourful display of the running processes and the colour helps to identify items. It has some unusual features, such as the ability to choose which CPU cores a process is allowed to run on. In addition to setting the priority of a process from six levels, this tool lets you set an I/O priority too. Processes and process trees can be terminated.

Only a few columns of information are shown by default, but right clicking a heading enables you to choose from a large number of columns.

A Network tab shows those processes and programs that are accessing the internet and it also shows the remote address. This is useful when tracking spyware and programs that access the internet for unknown reasons. A Disk tab shows the processes and programs reading or writing to the disk and it lists the files with full path information that they are accessing.

This is a powerful utility that is similar to, but more detailed than Process Explorer. It is a good one to add to your toolkit.