Users are blessed with a profusion of free, top class process viewers. Of these, Process Explorer from Sysinternals [1] has long been my favorite but there are many other candidates including PrcView, Nirsoft and the excellent Chinese program IceSword. With such a strong field I was a little shocked to discover yet another outstanding program. It’s called "What’s Running" [2] and has a number of features that could make it the best choice for a lot of users. First, processes are shown in a tree rather than a list, a representation that makes the parent and child relationship crystal clear. The same view provides process id, the name of the program that started the process and CPU utilization with the display sortable by any of these attributes. If you click on any process you get a wealth of information about that process displayed in a separate panel. Second, What’s Running doesn’t only show processes; it also displays, in separate tabs, running services, dlls, drivers, IP connections, startup programs and system information. The startup tabs and IP tabs are of particular interest as they are of sufficient quality that you don’t need separate dedicated applications to provide this information. So is What’s Running better than Process Explorer? For advanced technical users no, but all other users will benefit from the clear, non-confusing display and the fact they get a first class startup manager and IP enumerator in a single product. Thanks to subscriber Nigel Hislop for letting me know about this product. Free beta, Windows 2000 and later, 1.09MB.
[1] http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml
[2] http://www.whatsrunning.net/whatsrunning/main.aspx
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