Extended Task Manager

If you want to know what your Windows operatins system is doing behind your back, there are a couple of tools you might want to keep at hand. Process Explorer is one such tool - though it can often cause some weird behavior when playing games (due to the lame DRM in the games, not from the tool itself.)

But if Process Explorer is too complex for you to use, you can use Extended Task Manager.

Don't you just hate when your computer starts accessing your hard drive like crazy and you can't figure out what might be causing it? With this Extended Task Manager you'll be able to immediately find the culprit.

Once you find the offending program or process (using too much CPU, Disk, or Memory) you can pause it (or terminate it) to quickly do some other task before allowing to run as usual.

This process explorer can also show locked files and which processes are locking it -particularly useful whenever you're trying to delete a file and getting the "file in use" warning.