If you are a Windows 7 user and are a bit jealous of the advanced Task Manager available to Windows 8 users, then you can try Daphne – a freeware advanced task manager for Windows. It is a small application that can be used for killing, controlling or debugging Windows processes. In addition, it also includes many utilities like installed software viewer, control inspector, hidden applications viewer and more.
You can download Daphne from the DRK Software website. The downloads are available both in form of an installer as well as a ZIP archive containing the portable application. Being a fully portable application, it does not require any installation. You can extract the contents of the ZIP archive to a folder and double-click on Daphne.exe to run it. This application requires administrator privileges because it needs to control the processes being run on your PC.
The Daphne application windows displays all the processes being run on your system along with how much CPU percentage is being used by each process, PID for process, process name, full path name for process file, memory consumption etc. You can right-click on any of the process and select one of the many actions available from the menu that appears. You can choose to kill the process, kill it politely, kill at a specific time, or kill politely at a specific time. By killing politely, it means that you would be asked to close the open documents in the target application process. If you just select to kill it, the target process would be killed instantly without any warning. If you choose to kill an application at a specific time, then you are shown a tiny window where you can choose the date and time to kill that application process.
Daphne has a trap feature, that looks for a particular process and as soon as it is started, a pre-selected action is taken. You can right-click on a process in the list and choose Create Trap from the menu to create a trap for that process. You can choose what to do when that process is run – kill it, hide it, make it transparent and more. For example, if you select notepad.exe and set the trap to Kill it, then as soon as Notepad is launched it will be killed by Daphne.
Daphne also includes many other tools which can be accessed by clicking on the Daphne button. From the menu that pops up, you can select to run various tools like – Show installed software, Show process tree, Control inspector, Hidden applications, Scheduled Tasks and more. Each of these tools open in their own windows and are very useful to find more about installed software on your system and how it is affecting your PC.
In the settings for Daphne you can choose the look & feel, auto-starting of Daphne with Windows, Daphne update settings, edit Kill menu, edit Traps that you have set, logging and more. Under the More tab, you can also setup a multi-desktop feature which lets you have four different workspaces in a single desktop.
So if you want extra and more advanced features than the basic Windows Task Manager can provide, then you should get a copy of Daphne. It has many advanced features that allow you to kill, hide and debug all the running processes on your system. You can also make windows, linked to processes, transparent and set traps for them.
You can download Daphne from http://www.drk.com.ar/daphne.php.