processing

ProcessActivityView is supposed to give you a summary of the files and folders being accessed by a specific process. But thanks to its extremely confusing and poorly designed user interface, we had a difficult time discerning the information being fed to us.

The user interface appears as two separate windows. The first window displays all of your system's active processes, and the second window displays the file and folder access summary for a selected process. The first few times we made a process selection, nothing happened. A visit to the Help menu only offered us a link to the … Read more

Activ for Vista is a free program that claims to monitor your system's processes, DLLs, and Registry. Thanks to an unintuitive user interface and lack of user guidance, we never got very far with this program.

The user interface is too plain and too vague. There are three check boxes on the left side of the small window for settings: Process Start/Stop, DLL (Image) Load, and Registry. On the right side of the window are the file creation options. Not knowing where to go next, we checked off our monitor settings and clicked the Apply button. Nothing happened. … Read more

AnVir Task Manager Free offers users a one-stop shop for managing your system's running processes and applications. While it certainly delivers the information it promises, it could really benefit from a more streamlined interface design.

Users will need to spend a little time taking in AnVir's user interface, because at first glance it's a bit overwhelming. It uses tabs to distinguish system categories, such as startup, applications, processes, and services. Command buttons at the top of the window give you the ability to kill processes, block processes, free memory, and select a parent process. The bottom of … Read more

Daphne is a simple utility that makes it easier to manage your system's processes. Though it successfully let us kill and debug our processes, we found its Help file less than helpful.

You can access the program's features in two ways--right-clicking on the taskbar icon or through the main user interface. The main user interface is suitably plain, making it easy to navigate. The Settings menu lets you customize the display and configure the kill menu. There is also a feature for enabling the multidesktop feature, an uncommon feature that we liked. From the interface, you can view … Read more

Apple might be planning to allow background processing in a future iPhone, perhaps having decided that its planned push-notification system for the iPhone was not the best solution.

MacRumors has a report out today saying they've "heard" that Apple is thinking about dropping its objection to having iPhone applications run in the background at some point in the future. If you'll recall, Apple announced last June that iPhone users wouldn't be able to run more than one application at the same time in order to preserve battery life and performance, which surprised developers used to … Read more

Have you ever wondered what starts up automatically when you boot up your computer? Find out with this utility that gives you an easy to read chart displaying programs and processes that launch at start up.

Bootlog XP offers an intuitive design most users will find easy to understand. In order for the program to assess the boot process, the computer must restart. Because of the restart, the program may prove to be quite sluggish at first, but only because it is analyzing data gathered during the process. When the information is displayed in the chart, each file that has … Read more

For the paranoid or detail obsessed, Grouped Access Tools (GAT) would be a welcome Task Manager replacement. It also would appear to be a valuable software debugging tool. The interface is aesthetically spare, but not inappropriately so, as it provides well structured information on first launch. The menus seem logically arranged, and context menus are provided.

Installation is straightforward, but there's no option to exclude or specify the location of the Start Menu folder. GAT appears to deliver on all its promises, though the Memory Editor option never became an active option and couldn't be tested. With no … Read more

Many optimizer packages offer a mishmash of tools seemingly tossed in a box, but this well-designed, easy-to-use optimizer will satisfy nearly any novice user's system management needs. However, although the developer's description says the free download version has no limitations, some features were disabled in our tests.

Magic Memory Optimizer launches an attractive interface that's simple to comprehend and navigate. The initial launch window displays current usage for Memory, CPU, Physical Memory, along with some settings you can configure to tweak general memory management.

This utility worked fine in our tests, although we were disappointed that the … Read more

Developers are getting smarter by making their applications more appealing through improved interface design. But good looks don't necessarily mean good performance. But in the case of this toolbox, a professional-looking interface is nicely combined with ease of use and quick performance.

Memory Improve Professional launches a nicely designed interface that's easy to comprehend and simple to navigate. The dial-based gauge displays a quick-to-grasp visual of your system's memory use.

This app's tools performed nicely in our tests. We liked that the settings for configuring this utility's performance were on the launch window, so we … Read more