Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Geek Culture / Some processes just rape Task Manager, somebody set us up the ninja!

Author
Message
Van B
Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 15:15
Link
Hiya, kinda bored today so I thought I'd make a little tool to get revenge on stubborn processes.

For example, AVG is a pain to shut down, and when I need to share files with my brothers PC it's a right git. So I made a Process Ninja to deal with AVG, and it works a treat.

Basically, just pass a text file to it via it's shortcut with a list of the processes you want gone, and it'll get rid, and keep shutting them down as they appear. It leaves a little ninja icon in the task tray which let's you shut it off.

I'm not suggesting you go shutting your anti-virus down all the time, but when you do have to shut down stubborn applications this little tool could save you some hair loss.

We're going down... in a spiral to the ground...

Attachments

Login to view attachments
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Grandma
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Dec 2005
Location: Norway, Guiding the New World Order
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 15:29
Link
Nifty, this will come in handy. Stubborn applications piss me off. I tell them to shut down and they're all like "You don't own me!" And i'm like "umm, yeah, i basically do", and they're like "well.....i won't listen to you anyway". And then mom comes in to tell my i need my daily pills and i'm all like "Have...no...time...for pills! Must shut down...stubborn app!". yet app won't close.

Bu that's all in the past now.

This is text, please read it for the sake of the greater good, kthxbye.
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Fallout
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 1st Sep 2002
Location: Basingstoke, England
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 15:59
Link
Quote: "Bu that's all in the past now."


It doesn't sound like it is! Back to the padded cell!


Back to top
Profile PM
Grandma
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Dec 2005
Location: Norway, Guiding the New World Order
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 16:25
Link
But i just got out of there since the last incident....Guess what! I got to keep the jacket this time!

Now excuse me, i have to fight off this horde of aliens who threatens to delete all my codez if i don't give them my pink yo-yo.

Being insane, old, commie, gay and stupid is just my DBP forum image, in reality i'm somewhat normal. Altough friends and family would disagree.
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Dazzag
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Cyprus
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 19:24
Link
Nice. Although you have to be careful. A lot of the time it is just lazy coding. My Spy Sweeper program always comes up with a non-responding message on shut down, but leaving it 10 seconds or so will allow it to finish (if you kill it then you could have stopped something important it was doing). A good example was years ago I was producing MIS reports using Cognos utilities and noticed that it kept coming up with a "not responding" status on very big reports after a while (around 2gb of extracted data). Turned out it was still perfectly ok, and if you let it run it would eventually work. Took ages killing off the process and trying it again before finding the files were still being build...

Saying all that though, you can still get bloody processes that just sit there. Give it all the time in the world (I've come close), and they still won't shut down themselves. Well annoying. Perhaps you should amend your utility to start after a specified configurable time of shutdown (could be difficult if system is trying to shutdown everything). That would be cool. I quite often leave my laptop to shutdown then come back 10 hours later to see it didn't actually shut down and was now boiling from running the hard drive all day. Getting it to kick in and kill everything after, say, 10 minutes (configurable of course), would be awesome.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Van B
Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 19:57
Link
Yeah that should be easy to add, will look into it. Not much happening at work lately so it'll give me something to do, probably mess around with it more tomorrow, see what else I can get it to do. I could add a mini task manager to it, like a list of running processes that you can ban, then allow the ninja to keep shutting it down, might be handy.

That's the first time I ever got an icon on the task bar though, PureBasic is a lovely language.

We're going down... in a spiral to the ground...
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Dazzag
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Cyprus
Posted: 11th Jul 2007 23:25
Link
Yeah, I remember years ago coding an MIS database builder at work, and finding the code for an icon in the task bar. Come to think of it you could do what I did and have the icon turn into a % indicator as it processes. Looks cool. Although my program could take like half an hour to run depending on the size of the data and the computer it was running on so was pretty essential.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
indi
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Earth, Brisbane, Australia
Posted: 12th Jul 2007 03:09
Link


put that in your friends cron tab for a whole lot of fun.

Back to top
Profile PM Email
Three Score
20
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 18th Jun 2004
Location: behind you
Posted: 12th Jul 2007 04:11
Link
Sudo...what a cool name(for a person even)

I think this would be very good for repairing PCs with *shiver* Mcaffee on it..as there proxy crap stupid thing doesn't always work(much less saying that it only works on IE, defeating it's own purpose kind of)


umm...will you be able to ban multiple processes at a time?

one more bit...Is it possible to see the name of a process and the args that was passed to it? (Not sure this is possible even in the Windows API!)

Robot AI|My self coded blog|

She kills puppies.
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Van B
Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 12th Jul 2007 09:30
Link
It works with a text file, like just a list of processes you want rid of, it's fairly easy to make your own ini file for different software - it would be pretty cool if we made one for each anti-virus software that acts up.

I plan to see what I can do with it today, like adding an option to view all the processes, and being able to create ini files from within the ninja by selecting processes you want rid of. Thing about the ninja is that he has debug privileges, so he can actually shut down processes that you can't shut down in task manager.

I put it on my bro's PC yesterday, and it works a treat for him - basically AVG prevents his PC from being accesible on an XBox, we use an XBox to play AVI's over the network (like Lost etc). A few seconds after running the ninja his PC's shared folders are accesible on the XBox. Looks like you own me another pint George!.

We're going down... in a spiral to the ground...
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Roxas
19
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 11th Nov 2005
Location: http://forum.thegamecreators.com
Posted: 18th Jul 2007 18:17
Link
WOW! This program rules.. Ive always had some un needed prosecces what i cant remove or something what always comes back.. Now my memory usage dropped from 89% to 50% AWESOME!

[center]
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Dazzag
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Aug 2002
Location: Cyprus
Posted: 18th Jul 2007 22:44 Edited at: 18th Jul 2007 22:45
Link
Van, how about making it be a startup Ninja too?

I currently have the situation where some processes crash on boot up. An example is Sync2It which shares bookmarks between computers (was getting fed up with Foxmarks) and it seems to crash on my laptop (wireless link) but is fine on the other hard wired computers. After my wireless link connects properly then running Sync2It again works fine on the laptop.

What would be nice is if Ninja could detect the crash and try again after a set amount of time. Sounds a bit difficult that one, so how about if you could set startup items in Ninja to start after a certain amount of time. So Ninja, behind the scenes, actually stops the startup item (literally takes it out of the startup list which would be like what you get with Autoruns, until you turn it off in Ninja and it puts it back into the proper startup list), and starts them itself after the set amount of time the user enters against the item. Could do it with other (script and programming) tools, but easier if all within Ninja in an easy interface.

What do you reckon?

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Van B
Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 18th Jul 2007 23:48
Link
Cool Roxas, glad my little ninja could help.

Dazzag,
Yeah, I had planned to get more done on it, but been a bit swamped, damn boss is on holiday for 2 weeks.

What I was thinking is I could add parameters after the process name in the text file, like say I wanted to ban a process after a certain time, maybe:

explorer.exe (time:1600)

or

explorer.exe (delay:60)

Then have the ninja add in a counter, a process could then decrement it's counter before being banned, I'd just work out the delay when specifying the time. This might be handy for me, banning internet explorer after office hours for example, to stop the operators at work looking at porn .

One other factor could be an active process trigger, like...

avg.exe (active:bf2142.exe)

Then it could check to see if bf2142 is running, and set it to ban AVG or whatever, say a firewall app that might interfere with online games. This could work in reverse too, like non active so if one program relies on another, it could be shut down.

Anyhoo, I will find the time to look into this stuff, and also add in that mini task manager part as well. I would prefer to move away from manually editing the ini files, hopefully that'll be straightforward once the ninja has a proper window.

I used a lot of the code in a update system for an access database, like a few times a day this database takes data from Foxpro files and is used to generate reports. This actually involves an access 97 database that gathers the raw data, and an access 2000 database that processes it. I made it little program to run the databases in turn and activate triggers to kick users out of the database before replacing it with the updated version. It's a pretty cool system, actually have it wait on the user closing the database down before it starts updating, the user get's 5 minutes before it just kicks out the msaccess.exe process and starts it's update. It used to be a case of kicking out users for 15 minutes to update, with this ninja relative, the user is only kicked out while the database is replaced, 30 seconds or so . Wow I can prattle on huh!.

We're going down... in a spiral to the ground...
Back to top
Profile PM Email
Back to top

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-11-18 23:26:20
Your offset time is: 2024-11-18 23:26:20