Lifehacker put us on to a useful little free application called “Extended Task Manager” which bases itself on Windows’ built-in task manager and brings it up a notch.

Extended Task Manager goes above and beyond the basics of the default Windows Task Manger to give you information on disk activity, network usage, which ports are open, and more. All the graphs have mouse-over support, so if you see a spike in CPU usage, you just put the mouse over the spike and see which program was chewing up your cycles, and the same goes for disk usage and networking.

via Lifehacker.

It can be set-up to replace the normal task manager so that it appears when you hit the usual shortcuts such as Ctrl+Alt+Del, or Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or you can retain the Windows’ Task Manager and only launch it when you want it.

It definitely provides an awful lot more information than the normal Task Manager, and I’m particularly happy with the Ports information which shows what processes on your computer are accessing which ports, and more importantly, which IP addresses they’re connecting to.

The mouse-over functionality which it offers on the various graphing reports is also incredibly useful. With the normal Task Manager you could see spikes in CPU usage etc., but you would not be able to identify which application was causing that spike. Extended Task Manager presents a small pop-up window as you hover over each spike, showing you the overall usage at that point and the application which had the highest usage.

We recommend this useful little application which you can download direct from Extensoft, and you’ll be glad to know it’s freeware!