What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Daphne is a small utility that allows you to view and control the processes running on your system. The beauty of this utility is that it provides the ability to do this by dragging and dropping a target with your mouse. It also provides functions to modify, control and kill processes by name and to save these as rules. I had been looking for a “process manager” with the mouse capabilities for sometime so I am really pleased to have found this.

Summary:

• Lists all currently running processes
• Kill processes by name, from main window or by dragging a target onto the application window
• Control and modify processes in the same way as above
• Controls include hide application, always on top, hide , transparency, enable and disable
• Processes can be highlighted by colour in main window
• Shows full process path in main window
• Process priority can be changed in the main window
• Details of processes can be shown
• Access to database of process details (via web)
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Portable
• Identify process creating a window or dialog
• Full process paths
• Small Memory requirement
• Simple to Use
• Versatile & Useful Options
• Rules & Traps to manage processes automatically
• Look up information on running processes (needs Internet connection)

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Mouse target drop doesn’t always work
• Why does it need Alpha settings?
• Not a full Windows Task Manager replacement
• Internet “phone home” on start – why?
• Selecting Mouse target option in dropdown box doesn’t always work
• XP Users need to add “Debug Programs” privilege and needs administrator access

More About What it Does in Detail:

Quote from the DRK (Developers) website:

Daphne v1.32

Description:

Daphne is a small (system tray) application for killing, controlling and debugging window’s processes. You can kill a process by dragging the mouse over the windows, by right-clicking the process in the main process list, or by typing its name with the “Kill all by name” command. You can set a any window to be always on top, to be transparent, to be enable, et cetera. The main window displays a list of currently running process with detailed information about:

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• CPU usage
• Process ID
• Process name
• Full path (and arguments)
• Priority
• Class (Process / Service)
• Current memory usage
• Peek memory usage
• Current swap usage
• Peek swap usage
• Number of threads

New in Daphne v1.32:

• CPU and memory usage status on window.
• CPU usage on Daphne’s system tray icon tooltip.
• Support for DRK’s process data base information search and contribution.
• Highlight for high memory consuption process.
• New search on the web functionality.

DRK go on to describe the features as:

Features:

• Hide application tool: drop the target over the application’s window you want to hide. Later, you can restore the application from Daphne menu.
• Hide applications, makes an application disappear but keeps it running to get more desktop space.
• Find process window tool: identify the process which owns the targeted window.
• Traps: you can set up traps to be applied to any process being created.
• Detailed process list, including full path and arguments.
• Per process detail including: Windows tree, thread list, modules, enviroment variables.
• Using the windows tree you can: Show, hide, set always on top on or off, set focus, et cetera to any give window.
• Kill all by name: Kill all process using a given name.
• Kill menu: Customizable menu, each menu item has a process list to kill upon activation.
• Process list highlighting with colors for custom, system and high CPU-consumption processes.
• Control inspector window for revealing hidden passwords.
• Drag and drop tool for killing, setting alpha, enabling controls and putting windows always on top.
• “Hide Java VM from command line” option in advanced tab makes Daphne strip the path to the default Java VM in full path mode.
• Internationalization: Spanish support – Soporte para Español.
• Internationalization: Italian support.

System Tray Icon

Right clicking on the systray icon brings up the following dialog:

This dialog provides access to all the main functions, left clicking the systray icon will just show the main Daphne window as expected or clicking on “Show” in the systray menu will do the same.

The Main Window

Settings

Main Tab

(Click on pictures to enlarge)

This provides a fairly comprehensive set of useful options under a set of tabs which can be see in the screenshots above and below. These are all self explanatory (click on each screenshot to enlarge)

Look and feel

Kill Menu

Traps

Traps are rules to modify or kill a process when it is running. To add a Trap click on the “Add” button, the Trap… dialog is then displayed as shown below:

A Trap can also be set by right clicking on a process line in the main Daphne window and selecting “Create Trap”. In this case the process name is filled in the Trap… dialog automatically. A nice touch!

Highlights

This allows selection of highlighting for processes using more than 20% of memory (orange) , system processes (blue) and user defined processes (green) in the main Daphne window.

Advanced

Help

I presume the method to access the help file is by the button at the bottom right of the Settings dialog window. I couldn’t find another way of getting to it from the program or menus. This wasn’t working on the test system which may be a bug or the way I have set up the folders. However the help file is residing in the same folder as the application so it should be OK. I had to access the help file directly (using “Find and Run Robot by Mouser at DonationCoder)

The help files are provided with the download which is my preference to web based help. The help file for Daphne is rather limited.

General Use of Daphne

Daphne can be used either from the main application window or the right click menu from the system tray icon.

System Tray Icon

Main Application Window

This displays all the currently running processes complete with highlighting where set. There is also information on the CPU and memory at the top. At the bottom of the window their are options for showing the “Full path and arguments” in the “Path” column of the window and to switch “Always on top” on or off. There is also the target and dropdown for options which will be described later, plus buttons for “Settings” described above and the “Daphne” button.

Clicking on the Daphne button in the main window brings up a similar menu to the systray right click menu:

Running through the various options available in these menus:

Kill all by name

The “Kill all by name ” and “Kill all by name (Polite)” options bring up the same dialog box in which you must fill in the exact and complete process name. No wildcards allowed!

The difference between the two kill methods is in the system call used to kill the process.

With Kill the process will be killed using the TerminateProcess() system call.

If you choose the polite option, the process will be killed by sending a WM_CLOSE message.

Run Processes

This dialog is displayed:

Run Process As

Presents a dialog box in which a valid system user name and password must be added before the Run Processes dialog is displayed.

Control Inspector

This is a rather nice feature where you drag a magnifying glass cursor from the dialog box and hover it on the application window or a control within a window to see details, a red outline box defines the area of the control or window in question:

In the instance below the cursor is over a control in its own window

Hidden Applications

Displays a dialog box listing all the hidden application windows. Interestingly windows within an application can be hidden leaving the rest of the application visible using the mouse and target function which is describe further on in this review. As these hidden windows have no name they are shown only as a blue frame in the dialog.

Double clicking on the icon or frame “unhides” the window and removes it from the dialog.

The remaining options from the systray menu are:

About

which displays the about dialog as expected

Search the web…

This starts the default system browse and directs it to a Google based search page at the DRK website. Here you can search the web or the DRK website only.

Main Functions – Using the Mouse and Target & the Process Context Menu

Clicking on the dropdown next to the mouse target displays a list of different functions that can be set to be triggered when the target is dropped on an application. As noted previously selecting the different options can be a bit “hit and miss” so check before you “drop” the target to avoid disasters. The target cursor changes depending on the function selected e.g:

To use this click on the target and holding down the left button drag the target onto the appropriate window (or title bar) then release.

N.B the Kill option has no warning dialog so take care. Dropping the target on the Daphne application window has no effect so this is one option to avoid disasters, I haven’t explored others.

As a word of caution dropping the mouse on the main window does not always have the desired effect with some of the functions. Instead you seem to have to drop the target on the title bar. I haven’t explored this in detail but you may want to try this out for yourselves.

The other functions available are:

The “Find” option highlights the process in the main window when dropped on an application.

The “Disable” function prevents any change to the application and “Enable” reverses the disable option.

The remaining are obvious although I wonder about the Alpha options, from a personal point of view I have never found a use for semi transparent windows.

Also as noted before windows that are hidden can be all displayed in the “Hidden Applications” dialog.

While I have described this rather quickly and briefly this mouse functionality is the main selling point to me of this particular application

Individual Process Context Menu

This provides access to many of the functions already described so I will not repeat them.

The additional functions are:

Set Focus – This gives the process window (if there is one) focus and brings it to the top.

Set Priority - This allows the setting of the process priority as in Windows Task Manager

(as most of you will know setting a process to real time needs to be done with great caution! to avoid locking out all other processes and access to the system)

Copy Name – Simply copies the process name with extension to the clipboard, but not the full path e.g. WindowsLiveWriter.exe

Copy – Provides the ability to copy either the PID, the path or the path and arguments to the clipboard.

Look up into DRK DB - opens the default system web browser at the DRK website where information is displayed on the process (if available in the DRK DB)

The available information is displayed among some Google adverts but then everyone has to make a living so I have no problem with this.

This is a useful function but depends on the quality of information in the DRK DB. which brings me to the last option:

Submit to DRK DB - This is an opportunity to add new or update existing information to DR

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

*There is also an installer available but my preference is for the zip file and instant portability

What is the My Free Review Experience?

As I said earlier I have been looking for an application that could kill processes with exactly this functionality for some time. The fact that it has all the other options (except transparency) is a real bonus.There are other very good task managers out there some of which are in my portable applications suite but this one is another “keeper” for me. Personally I rate this highly as:

Powerful – Stable – Good options

What Could Make it be Better?

1. Wildcards for naming processes(could be dangerous so some filtering)
2. Turn Traps/rules on and off
3. Be specific about where target has to be dropped with colour change or similar on the target cursor.
4. Better help file

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Donation Coder Freeware Utilities, Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications

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Technorati Tags: My Free Review, Freeware Utilities, Utility Process Manager, Portable, Portable Freeware Portable Application, Windows, Windows XP, Independent Review, Impartial Review

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Portable Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.