Most servers come with tools to restart crashed applications or to notify a system administrator to fix the problem. Home servers or single user computers on the other hand do not have these tools on board. That’s where Restarter comes into play.

The small program can monitor selected Windows processes and restart them if they fail to respond. The software program will display a list of all running Windows processes upon startup. Single processes can be selected from the list so that they are monitored and restarted if they crash.

Several options are provided to make the software more versatile. It is possible to define startup parameters, a working directory and the application monitoring interval which is set to five seconds by default. Application crashes are by default written to a log file.

Crashed Windows processes can be restarted. This option is enabled by default as well. It is possible to restart them in minimized state and to play a sound to notify the user. The process monitor can furthermore kill unresponsive tasks automatically to restart them again.

The Restarter uses roughly 10 Megabytes of computer memory while running and monitoring applications in the background. It is compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 7 and can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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The interface of System Explorer is tab driven. It displays various information like Tasks, Processes, Modules or Opened Files in the various tabs on the top of the software program. Each tab will list the designated information, the process tab will for instance list the process names, their dependencies, cpu usage, process id and memory usage.

One of the interesting options that System Explorer provides is the ability to display or request additional information about an entry. A right-click on an entry will open a context menu with options to display file information, query Internet databases like Process Library or checking the file with online virus scanners like Virus Total.

That’s interesting for users who want to check up on processes or modules running on their computer system.

Unlike Microsoft’s Task Manager System Explorer does provide additional information. It will for example list all open connections of a computer system including the applications responsible for the connection. It will furthermore display the opened files or a process history in its interface which provide additional valuable information to the user.

Another interesting option is the snapshot ability. Users can create system snapshots and compare them to previous snapshots that they have created. This can be interesting to compare before and after system states while installing or updating software programs.

System Explorer provides access to additional system related features next to the extensive system monitoring options. It will list autostart entries, software programs that are installed on the computer system and link to system utilities like computer management or group policy management.

The software program can be used to replace the Windows Task Manager. To do that select the “Replace Task Manager” option in the Options menu on top. System Explorer will open whenever the user starts the Task Manager from then on.

Resource usage of System Explorer is low, it uses less than 5 Megabytes of computer memory while running which is acceptable considering all the advanced features that it brings to the table.

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The main window of the Access Tools presents the running processes on the system. Information like memory usage, company and ID are presented in the interface which is automatically updated in real time. The lower pane contains an event viewer that displays events such as starting or closing processes. A click on a process displays additional information about that process such as its parent process or system path.

This is one of the areas that Process Explorer handles in a better way. The Sysinternal’s application displays all processes in a tree view with child processes beneath their parent’s processes which guarantees a better overview.

Grouped Access Tools would be nothing more than a better Windows Task Manager if that would be the complete functionality. Thankfully though it is not. A right-click on a process opens a quick access menu to functions like terminating, suspending, resuming or wiping the memory of the selected process.

It is a bit strange that not all of the functions are available in the right-click menu, especially those that open windows with extensive information about the selected process. More than half of the available functions are only accessible from the top menu.

The Process Information window for instance contains five tabs with extensive information about modules, threads, handles, file information and process information.

Grouped Access Tools comes with a memory dump and memory editing function which could be quite interesting for debugging purposes. Below is a list of features taken from the developer’s homepage which the Access Tools have that Process Explorer does not.

• Auto Filing/ Move on Boot
• Auto Processing
• Hidden Process Scanning
• Module (DLL) Termination
• Multiple methods of ending a process
• Multiselection and handling
• Process Logging
• Running programs in System Mode

Process Explorer on the other hand provides access to several tools that Grouped Access Tools provide only partially or not at all.

Grouped Access Tools runs on all Windows NT systems including Windows XP and Windows Vista. Provided are a portable version and a version that has to be installed.

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Kill Process is a process manager developed by Orange Lamp Software Solutions. The main purpose of the application is to provide the user with means to kill several processes at once and it can also prevent that new blocked processes are spawned on the system. That second feature comes in handy in numerous other occasions, more about that later.

The main interface of Kill Process displays a list of all processes that are currently running on the system. The list contains information about each process that includes its name, description and memory usage. Detailed process information are available by selecting the process and hitting enter or right-clicking it and selecting Process Information from the menu.

Processes are automatically added to the kill list once they have been marked for termination. The kill list can contain multiple processes that can be batch killed easily. This comes in very handy if you want to kill processes that spawn another instance of related processes. If you only use this feature Kill Process stops after killing the selected processes, even if a new process that is in the kill list spawns.

This can be prevented by the second feature of Kill Process: Process Scanning. If you activate Process Scanning Kill Process with actively scan the system for processes in the kill list and terminate those processes as soon as they appear as a process. The time between scans can be defined which is essential to prevent cpu overload.

This feature comes in handy in a number of occasions. Say you want to get rid of that dreaded ctfmon.exe or other processes that appear every time Windows starts and you do not know how to suppress them. It is also possible to prevent that applications that you start spawn new processes.

Kill Process can be configured to run silently in the background by suppressing all errors and disabling confirmations.

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