Useful Desktop Tools for Windows, Part 2 - ProcessQuickLink

Tony Austin
Sunday, 14 September 2008 09:57

Opinion and Analysis

Instead of having to go off on a difficult hunt -- possibly turning into a wild goose chase -- to find out about any given Windows task, with ProcessQuickLink installed you only have to click on the icon adjacent to the task name and a window describing this task opens in your default browser.

For example, to pick one out of a hat, there's a task named csrss.exe (see green arrow in Figure 1). You don't know what it is.

You haven't noticed it before. Is it a vital Windows component? Is it something installed by a third-party application? It may be unexpectedly chewing up large chunks of your system resources (CPU and/or disk).

Worst of all is it some sort of undesirable program -- maybe even malware (virus, trojan, spyware, adware) -- that you'll want to delete as soon as possible? And if you do delete it, will Windows stop operating properly or even come to a grinding halt and refuse to ever boot up again?

Here are the ProcessQuickLink results for this task (csrss.exe):

      Figure 2 - Process Library results for csr22.exe task
Click to see larger image (in a new window)
You can examine the actual results page here

As you can see this is a valid Microsoft-provided Windows task and one that you most definitely do not want to cancel!

There certainly are other ways to get to this point, but using ProcessQuickLink is the easiest that I've found yet.

I hope that this tip helps get you out of trouble some time. I'd love to hear about it from you via the iTWire comments system.