Task Killer is a small but very useful Windows software which places a new icon in the system tray that you can use to terminate running processes.
A click on the program icon displays all running processes, open windows, and services in an easy to use interface. Each process is listed with its memory usage and name so that you can easily identify them and locate those that use a lot of computer memory.
A click on a process kills that process after verification that you really want to do so. The main purpose of Task Killer is to provide you with the means to quickly kill a process that is running on the system without having to load the Windows Task Manager or another program to do so first. This can be very useful in situations where the Task Manager won’t open anymore because of a freeze or hang.
What I particularly like about Task Killer is that it not only gives you the means to terminate any running process on the system, but also that it displays the memory consumption of each process so that you can use it as well to find processes that consume a lot of memory.
I found out about MediaAgent.exe this way for instance about which I have published a guide about today.
You can modify the program behavior in the settings. Right-click the system tray icon and select Settings from the context menu. Here you can make the following modifications:
- Exclude processes or services from being displayed by the program. This is useful to avoid terminating the wrong programs or making sure that certain processes are safe and never list, or don’t mess up the display.
- Configure hotkeys to use the program with the keyboard.
- Enable or disable confirmations. If you disable confirmations, processes get terminated immediately.
- Load the program on startup.
- Change the interface language.
- Enable smart kill.
- Change the appearance.
This was actually the way that I found that MediaAgent.exe was running on my system which lead to another article I posted earlier today.
Update: Please note that the program website is no longer available. The latest program version works fine under all newer versions of the Windows operating system. We have uploaded the latest version of the program to our own server. To download it click on the following link: Task Killer