Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Daphne: Control, Kill and Debug Windows Processes

daphne windows app

Daphne is a small (system tray) open source application for killing, controlling and debugging Windows' (2000, XP, 2003 and Vista) processes. It was born to kill a Windows process and became almost a task manager replacement.

The main window displays a list of currently running process with detailed information about: CPU usage, Process ID, Process name, Full path (and arguments), Priority, Class (Process / Service), Current memory usage, Peek memory usage, Current swap usage, Peek swap usage and Number of threads.

Features:

  • Enhanced (experimental) multidesktop feature: use up to four windows desktops using WindowsKey + F5 to F8.
  • Installed software list for inspecting installed software available in tray icon menu. Installed software
  • Check process hierarchy tree using the "Show process tree" at tray icon menu. Process tree
  • Parent process name an PID at process' properties.
  • Now you can make configuration portable using INI file instead of registry base configuration.
  • Support for DRK's process data base information search and contribution.
  • Hide application tool: drop the target over the application's window you want to hide. Later, you can restore the application from Daphne menu.
  • Hide application, makes an application disappear but keeps it running to get more desktop space.
  • Find process window tool: identify the process which owns the targeted window.
  • Traps: you can set up traps to be applied to any process being created.
  • Detailed process list, including full path and arguments.
  • Per process detail including: Windows tree, thread list, modules, enviroment variables.
  • Using the windows tree you can: Show, hide, set always on top on or off, set focus, et cetera to any give window.
  • Kill all by name: Kill all process using a given name.
  • Kill menu: Customizable menu, each menu item has a process list to kill upon activation.
  • Process list highlighting with colors for custom, system and high CPU-consumption processes.
  • Control inspector window for revealing hidden passwords.
  • Drag and drop tool for killing, setting alpha, enabling controls and putting windows always on top.
  • "Hide Java VM from command line" option in advanced tab makes Daphne strip the path to the default Java VM in full path mode.
  • Internationalization: Spanish, Italian, German, French, Chinese, Valencian, Polish, Russian, Portuguese and Japanese support.
Download Daphne | Once again, thanks to Tinhed for suggesting this great app.

Windows Process Killer: SPKiller

windows process killerWe already covered a Windows Process Blocker but you still got notifications in the systray about blocked processes when using it. Luckily, gHacks just found an even better Windows process blocker application called SPKiller.

SPKiller is a similar application to Windows Process Blocker that sits quietly on a timer thread in the background, stopping and killing any service and/or process that you specify in the SPKPreferences.xml file every n milliseconds. Very handy for things you just can’t seem to get rid of - AdobeUpdater, GoogleToolbarNotifier, AppleMobileDeviceService, etc, etc.

The installation will simply place the files of the program in a directory on the computer’s hard drive. The user has to click on InstallService.bat to install the Windows Service. After that the Service needs to be started in the Windows Services Overview.

The Windows Process and Services blocker is configured with a simply XML file that is located in the program’s installation directory. The configuration is not more complicated than editing a text document. It is made up of three sections that are of importance to the user. The first is called CycleTime and defines the interval in milliseconds that the running services and processes are checked. ServiceNames contains a list of Windows Services that should be blocked if running while ProcessNames does the same for Windows processes.

The SPKPreferences.xml is preconfigured with several services and processes that can prove to be performance drains, or just annoying in general. Modify this file to suit your needs.