FreeWare program of the month

Process Explorer

I have had some problems in the last few weeks with my PC getting choked on some kind of rogue programs. After running AntiVirus and SpyBot programs to insure it wasn't some kind of infection, I started looking for the circumstances under which it chokes.

Using task manager, I was able to determine some instances of it choking on certain web sites, but I always had to remember to start task manager each time I started working, and if I closed it for any reason (I have a habit of closing all of my windows, in rapid succession when I get a choke condition), I lost any history it had.

There is a really excellent utility to replace Task Manager (for Win2k and WinXP) that provides a lot of flexibility that Task Manager does not make convenient, such as starting up as soon as you log on, and when you hit close, it simply shrinks to a tray icon (you can actually close it from there if you wish).

Freeware program, the author does not ask for anything in return for its use. "Sysinternals," the author's website was acquired by Microsoft, but still seems to function as an independent resource, and has a lot of neat utilities.

Used with another program (Autorun) from the same sight, I found a couple of things loading at startup that I didn't know about, but in the long run, I am not enough of a whiz at computers to fix whatever is choking my PC. I did learn, from the author's blog, that I am not the only one that is having this problem, and it seems to be some poorly written programming, possibly in Java, for displaying web pages.

One caviot, Process Explorer has been "Upgraded" from the edition I am using, to work on Vista and Windows7. There may or may not be some bugs with the new release (there have been complaints). I would wait another month before trying the new edition, just in case.