It is no secret that us OSNews editors – Eugenia and I, mostly – have fond memories of the BeOS. So, whenever a handy BeOS feature makes its way into other operating systems, I zealously point it out in the articles or comments I write about them. Call it a harmless little compulsion. Anyway, a few days ago, while hanging around in Haiku’s irc channel, a link to a screenshot showed an interesting little piece of BeOS legacy which had found its way to Windows.
A very popular BeOS application – or, more correctly, replicant – was ProcessController, a little tool written by Georges-Edouard Berenger. ProcessController lived inside your taskbar or any other replicant-friendly application, and showed memory and processor usage live, in real-time. That wasn’t all, though, as it allowed you to perform all sorts of neat little tricks:
- Quit any application that is running (both background and non-background BApplications),
- Screen the Memory usage of the different teams/applications,
- Screen the activity of each individual team & thread graphically and “Live”,
- Kill any team,
- Change the priority of any thread,
- Kill any thread,
- Start the debugger on a thread, with an intelligent semaphore releasing mecanism,
- Turn on & off processors,
- Launch a terminal,
- Re-launch the Tracker (available if it is not running anymore),
- Re-launch the Deskbar (available if it is not running anymore),
- Access the documentation, adopt Pulse’s colors, install/remove in/from the Deskbar.
ProcessController came in very handy when playing around with beta or alpha software, as it allowed you to easily kill threads and applications without having to resort to task managers or cli commands. In addition, if you experienced sluggish performance, you could easily check via ProcessController which application or process was the culprit.
As it turns out, ProcessController has found its way to Windows, thanks to k23 productions. The tool works on Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003, but I’m using it on Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, and it seems to work just fine. Especially the ability to show every process’ memory and CPU usage in a separate window can be really useful in determining when a certain application chokes. The tool shows an awful lot of information, all of which might be useful in a troubleshooting scenario.
The tool even uses BeOS icons and graphics, which only add to the authenticity of the experience. If you spend a lot of time in Windows, this GPL-licensed tool can be a real time-saver.
We’ve had something similar on Windows for years in the form of ProcessExplorer. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
It’s a shame that the default task manager still sucks even on Vista and you have to rely on third parties to provide a more useful alternative. Reminds me of Finder on OS X …
im guessing its microsofts way of dodging anti-monopoly legislation…
Uh … ProcessExplorer is one of the best tools out there that replaces the task manager. It was originally written by the guys at Sysinternals who are experts at Windows development. Then MS bought them out and ProcessExplorer is now hosted on MSDN.
I just don’t understand why MS doesn’t just replace the damn task manager with ProcessExplorer that’s tons better.
ProcessExplorer, while really useful in its own right, doesn’t really offer the same accessibility to the mentioned features as ProcessController does. PE is an extended version of the task manager, while PC is something else.
They both deliver the same functionality, but they deliver it differently.
What’s less accessible in PE compared to PC? Judging from the screenshots on the PC page (http://www.k23productions.com/products/process_controller/art/snap….) I’d say PE offers the same information as PC does except most of it is viewable at a glance (http://i.technet.microsoft.com/bb896653.ProcessExplorer(en-us,MSDN….).jpg) rather than having to drill down like in PC. I’d even say that judging from PC’s page PE offers more functionality than PC (viewing DLL’s mapped into a process’ address space for instance, no mention of this on PC’s page). Then again, I’ve not installed PC to see how it stacks up against PE, PE has everything I need anyways, and then some.
And PE is anything but an extended version of the task manager as someone already pointed out (if by extended you mean a wrapper around the native task manager). And even if it was, what difference does it make?
What’s funny about the PC screenshot btw is that PC is taking up the most resources together with VLC.
Looks like rip-off from KDE.
Perhaps the other way around… ProcessController has been around since at least 2000… has the KDE tool you reference been around longer than that?
Nevermind… I guess you were referring to ProcessExplorer (damn similar names got me all confused)
It is odd to see something ported from an obscure OS to Windows. I tried it and it looks and behaves remarkably like the BeOS version.
I’ll have to find some mal-ware and see how it shows up in Process Controller 🙂
There SO many odd processes and threads running I will be busy with Google to understand what is not needed.
Amazing! Downloading it right now…
I know several apps has similar behavior, but as the editor said, everyone with some good BeOS memories will appreciate it… =]
but will it run in reactOS?
All i need now to get my BeOS fix is opentracker and deskbar for windows.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that would make me switch from Linux to Windows.
Edited 2008-07-01 18:59 UTC
Why not port those to Linux instead? Then you wouldn’t have to switch.
Amen to that!
All I need is some windows games ported to Haiku
Works great on my 64-bit Vista SP1.
Does anybody know of a small application like this, which lets you monitor network traffic per process as well ?
Maybe some applications found here: http://pcwin.com/software/Network_Process_Monitor/ ?
You can also get TCPView from Sysinternals (now hosted on Technet).
I use this tool a lot to find issues. It works incredibly well.