If you are looking for a powerful Task Manager alternative/replacement, or simply a tool to manage the processes and services that running on your system, then Process Hacker might be the right system utility application for you. I’ve been using Process Hacker since version 1.3.x, so far Process Hacker is indeed an ultimate task manager and I can see the developers have put great efforts to improve and make Process Hacker a powerful system tool.

Process Hacker functionality and interface quite similar to Process Explorer’s. However, Process Hacker offers you 2 additional functionalities that Process Explorer don’t have; the ability to manage services and network connections information.

On ‘Processes’ tab, you can do the basic Task Manager actions such as terminating process, changing process priority, etc.. You can also easily search the process file name on Google, upload a process file to VirusTotal, and if you know what you’re doing, Process Hacker offers you advanced features such as terminating process using different methods, inject DLL into a process, inspect process threads, protect a process, write directly to process memory and many more. The processes are highlighted according Own, System, Service, Debugged, Elevated, Job, .NET, POSIX, Packed/Dangerous, Suspended Threads, GUI Threads, Relocated DLLs, Protected Handles and Inherit Handles. The highlighting color can be changed and each of them can be enabled or disabled to allow more visibility of administration of the processes running on your system.

On the ‘Services’ tab, Process Hacker will give you the list of services on your system. From here, you can stop, start, delete or change the start type of any services. On ‘Network’ tab, you will see the network connections that have been made by the process running on your system. Process Hacker allows you to close network connections made by any running process. You can also perform whois lookup on a connection’s remote address, tracert and ping.

Process Hacker is free and open source (licensed under GNU General Public License 3 or later). Process Hacker is actively developed and it is written using C#, .NET 2.0, and some C coding for Process Hacker’s kernel-mode driver. Process Hacker requires at least .NET Framework 2.0 installed on your system.

On the other note, for those who don’t like .NET applications, Process Hacker 2.0 might be written in C with no dependencies on .NET Framework. You can see the progress on Process Hacker’s Sourceforge repositories (link).