AnVir – Free Windows task manager replacement

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 5:47 am

We all use the Task Manager for looking under the hood of our system’s processes. It let’s you see the different processes running on your computer together with information on the following things:

username which basically tells you who owns the process
the CPU utilization so you know how much of the processing power a process is eating up
the CPU time which tells you how much time a process has been running
the memory usage so you know how much RAM the process is using

For folks who have not tried using the Windows task manager just right click on your taskbar and click Task Manager:

You can sort the columns by clicking the header so you will easily see which processes eat most of your memory for example. If you really want to learn all there is to know about the Task Manager, make sure to read my three part article on how to use the Windows Task Manager.

The task manager is a very powerful tool but it has it’s limitations. Here are a few of them:

there is no easy way to determine which processes started during startup time
no way to remove a process from the startup processes
no way to differentiate a normal process from services
no way to see where the process’s executable is stored on the harddisk

Along comes Anvir Task Manager which gives you more control over your processes. A free version is available on their website: http://www.anvir.com/. The installer is surprisingly only 1.5MB. The interface is tabular witch like the Windows task manager is easy to follow.

The tabs let users separately see which are startup, active applications, processes and services:

You can easily pickup the tool since every task is a right click away. For example, to kill a process just right click the process and choose End Task:

Startup processes management is also very easy do with this tool. To remove a process from startup, just click the process and choose Edit > Delete Entry:

To add a process on the startup, right click the process and choose Add to Startup:

Without this tool, you might still be tweaking with regedit just to be able to do these type of stuff. What you will appreciate most about this tool is that it gives you details about the process. To see the details of a process, just simply double click the process:

You can also assess the security of the process since it provides you which entity certified the process:

If you want to see which libraries are used by the process, just click the DLL tab:

Other information like files used by the process, connections, performance, windows and drivers are available too. It’s charts for interface works like the Windows task manager but it allows you to set the chart scale and see everything on a single chart:

You can also export the log of the processes as a HiackThisPro log which is helpful for others to see a list of process on a format familiar with the powerful HijackThis tool:

This is clearly a great tool for people who want to take over their computer. There are a lot of important features but it is not short on its share of bells and whistles. You will be able to set the transparency of a processes’ window for example.

Give it a try if you need more task management control. You will not be disappointed.