Windows has enormous amount of small and large system utilities (some of them present since as early as Windows 3.1). Some of them are easy to find in places like Control Panel, some can only be launched by specific executable name.
Overall it is far from user friendly, but over time all those executables became more or less documented and some utilities provide easy access to them. XPSysPad is one of those.
What it does
XPSysPad has simple interface with basic list of running processes and extensive menu.
Menu provides fast access to:
- administration consoles;
- control panel applets;
- system utilities;
- system and profile folders.
My main complain with folders is that it can only be used to get access to specific files. Folders themselves cannot be opened from menu. I’d like menus to be accessible from tray icon as well.
Overall
I’d say that for using specific Windows functions daily it is better to create direct shortcuts or use text-based launcher (such as SmartStartMenu). However XPSysPad was designed as an app for novice users and exploring. It can be real time saver for looking up rarely used stuff as well.
Writes some settings to INI file in Windows folder but works without installation. I have no idea if it works in Vista, but my guess it won’t. Could someone confirm that please? :)
Home&download http://www.xtort.net/xtort-software/xpsyspad/
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for the most part, it works in vista. some things that have been removed i vista or are unavailable until they’re installed wont run. trying to change process thread priority generates an error.
@camilo
Thanks for confirmation, expected something like that. Some utilities are back from 3.1 times so I guess quite a few moved on to Vista as well. :)
By the way I try to stay away from procees priority, was playing with that in the past and ended up with some very obscure bugs and slowdowns.
Nice utility! Can we also know if the process shown here is a system process, a user process or a network process? The reason being, I had issues killing a process as I did not noticed that it’s a system process!
@Arun
Well, this one obviously sucks for working with processes. :) If you need good process manager check out Process Explorer
http://www.rarst.net/software/process-explorer/