ProcessQuicklink from ProcessLibrary.com

ProcessQuicklink from ProcessLibrary.com

This is another excellent source of information about the inner workings of your computer. Most of us know how to pull up Task Manager and the 'Applications' tab is pretty helpful in sorting out the status of the programs currently running on your system. Sometimes, just clicking 'End Process' on a balky application is enough to clear the log jam and get you back to business.

Next to 'Applications' is the 'Processes' tab. There you'll see a long list of the things that are going on in the background and sometimes you can spot the one that's hogging resources and relentlessly pushing the CPU to 100%. While some of these files have reasonable names like ' OUTLOOK.EXE', some of them are written by guys that never leave the basement unless they're running low on Mountain Dew. They name their programs things like 'btwins.exe' or 'jqs.exe' and that's not a lot of help, is it? If one of those is out of control, how do you know what you're messing with if you shut it down? And how do you know that they're even legitimate parts of the programs you want on your system?

That's where ProcessQuicklink comes in. It puts an icon beside every running process that takes you directly to it's entry in Uniblue's Process Library. There you'll find out that "btwdins.exe is a part of the Microsoft Windows Operating System which deals with Bluetooth functionality and should not be terminated" and "jqs.exe is a jqs\r belonging to Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U5\r from Sun Microsystems, Inc.\r".

As always, a little knowledge can be a bad thing. Before you start shutting down processes, be sure you know what you're messing with. It would be smart to backup anything you're working on and close any running applications. Making a Restore Point might be overkill, but it wouldn't hurt anything either.

Mike Lin's Home Page

Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel

It seems that every program you load on your machine adds something new to the startup process and, before you know it, there's stuff going on you don't know about and maybe don't want happening. Your system takes longer and longer to start and seems to drag more and more as time goes on. It seems to me that anything that gives you more information or control over startup is a good thing. I've used this utility to do just that for several years and I highly recommend it.

The Startup Control Panel give you a direct look into all the different processes that load as your system starts. It's easy to access from the Windows Control Panel and it lets you selectively disable or delete them. A word of caution though: You're messing with the Registry here so be sure to know what you're doing. Creating a System Restore point before any changes would be a wise step.