Written By:
Date Posted: May 13, 2002

It's usually best practice to disable programs you don't want autostarted, but if you're absolutely sure you don't need the program, you can remove it altogether.

Another feature I liked, though not really that useful, is the Open Windows feature. Some programs, such as Photoshop, open a ton of Windows. Rather than clicking through them in the application itself, you can just do this in Wintasks. The above example isn't really a good illustration, as I'm sure anyone can navigate through 5 windows, but imagine if you have 15 or 20 of them open.

More for informative purposes, you can examine the modules needed to run whatever programs you use. In reality, I didn't really know what to do with the information provided here, but perhaps a high level system administrator would like this feature.

The last test I did was the killing of processes. The first test, I killed Photoshop (after saving all the images for the review), and the program immediately shut down without any prompts to save. The next test was to shut down IE, after opening a page I knew that would hang the browser (this was done with a local HTML file pointing at a corrupt Flash element that I'm still troubleshooting). In the past, task manager wasn't able to kill the process. This time, Wintasks did, although it took me two tries.

I didn't test out the scripting features, but one feature I did like was the ability to consolidate a bunch of programs into one task. Whenever I bootup, email, chat and IE are always the first 3 programs I start up. Instead of opening each one up separately, I consolidated everything into one button, and use that to start them up.

Final Words

WinTasks 4 Professional is one of those programs that I think would make a worth addition to any IT manager's software suite. Almost every Windows based troubleshooting tool is present in one convenient package, and it works as advertised.

At the same time, I'm left wondering if the majority of users will actually need this program. As I just said, almost all the Windows tools are here, so why not just use those? As a MCSE (keep your comments to yourself please ), I use all these tools daily, so Wintasks isn't a priority for me. However, I do like the fact that I don't need to open 4 different tools or windows to do everything. In that case, Wintasks has now joined my suite of analysis software.

For 60$, I do find this awfully expensive. Granted, this is for the retail version, and a electronic version can be had for 37$. LIUtilities offers a 30-Day money back guarantee, so it's something worth checking out.

LIUtilities:

Pros: Easy to use, total control over Windows processes, ability to consolidate programs into one button.

Cons: Doesn't do anything that doesn't already come with Windows

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