Terminator Advanced Edition

Everything that’s running on your computer keeps some resources busy, and can easily be identified by the corresponding process or service. Windows comes with a pretty decent task manager to handle malfunctioning or misbehaving processes, but in case it doesn’t quite tickle your fancy, alternatives like Terminator Advanced Edition can surely come in handy.

Once installed, you can go ahead and run the application to see if it’s any better than the default Task Manager. However, you need to make sure .NET Framework is also installed on your computer. Luckily, modern Windows iterations come with the framework as a default feature.

In order to properly gather information related to processes and services, the application needs to be run from an administrator account, or with elevated privileges. Although it tries to be different from the default Windows counterpart, the visual design leaves more to be desired, especially since it can’t be resized to get a better view of items on the list.

Terminator Advanced Edition comes with a tab structure for you to easily access processes, services, windows, system info, and general options. Unfortunately, some degree of attention is required to spot entries of interest, because there aren’t any groups, or filter options, even if you click on the corresponding column headers.

Processes and services can be terminated, killed, suspended, or stopped at the press of a button. Moreover, you can access advanced details, which brings up a new window dedicated to the selected item, also showing a few gauges for resource consumption. More tasks can be added through the options menu, where you also find the possibility to have unresponsive processes automatically killed.

Bottom line is that task management is not quite a task for everyone, but can be thoroughly handled through the tools Windows puts at your disposal. However, if you do happen to need advanced operations, Terminator Advanced Edition is sadly not the one you’re looking for, with various info fields that fail to show anything, and an overall design that makes navigation rather difficult.