LISTSP Is A Windows Task Manager Alternative With Search & Driver Monitoring

For the vast majority of us, Windows Task Manager provides all the required information regarding currently running processes, programs, services and network components, and gives a lot of flexibly and control over how you can handle these items. Though that doesn’t keep third-party alternatives from popping up every now and then, and the latest from the lot that we stumbled upon is LISTSP. I won’t really call it an effective replacement to the built-in Task Manager from Windows 8, but it does have a few nifty features that make it stand on its own, the first and foremost of which is the integrated search function that lets you instantly look for any running process or service.

LISTSP is an open-source application, and supports a very flat design that goes well with Windows 8. When launched, it presents similar tabs on top that you’d find in the stock Task Manager app. These include Processes, Services, Drivers and Network, and are pretty much self-explanatory. Each tab displays its relevant items and their pertaining information. For instance, Under Processes, you will see process names, status (running or stopped), PID, priority, memory usage, threshold and so on. The Drivers tab is something new though, and displays information regarding currently loaded drivers on your system related to the connected hardware components like sound, display, network adapters and the like.

LISTSP also lets you perform system power off actions such as shutdown, restart or hibernate, lock, standby and log off from within the app; simply click the Shutdown menu at the top, followed by your desired action from the list. The Search feature I mentioned earlier is probably the most useful bit of the app and since the default Task Manager lacks this option, you can use LISTSP instead for the purpose. It swiftly searches for the typed keyword or phrase in the list, and presents the matched results almost instantly. When you right-clicked an item from the list, the context menu allows you to perform further actions like end the process, change its priority, alter permissions and so on.

Apart from handling current processes, drivers and services, LISTSP also makes it possible to launch a few system tools. For instance, you can directly launch the Device Manager from within the program, which makes sense as you can easily check certain information regarding a driver before removing it under the Drivers tab. Other than that, you may also map a network drive, create a service for the selected process, open its related registry key, and more.

Although it looks quite barebone on the surface, LISTSP is a good app for quickly digging into details for a certain process or service. The app was tested on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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