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If you've ever tried tracking down a process in Windows Task Manager, you know it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Process Explorer makes the job a lot easier. This freeware utility displays running processes in an intuitive tree format that includes not only process names, but also program icons and other data, such as description, image, and processor time.

It also can identify the process for a given application window or look up a process name in Google--a handy way to spot spyware. The latest version, more than three years in the making, introduces several … Read more

Emerging from a rough 2009, the technology industry has begun to recover, says a new report from Forrester.

The $741 billion U.S. IT market is now expected to see an 8.4 percent rise in spending this year, according to Forrester's latest "U.S. and Global IT Market Outlook: Q1 2010," released Thursday. The rebound will be more subdued but still solid for the global tech market, now forecast to grow 7.7 percent in U.S. dollars for 2010.

The latest estimate for growth in U.S. tech outshines Forrester's January forecast of 6.… Read more

A gritty video released by Wikileaks on Monday shows U.S. troops in Iraq destroying a vehicle that was preparing to rush a wounded Reuters journalist to the hospital.

The secret black-and-white video, recorded by at least one Apache helicopter that was shooting at a group of about a dozen people, appears to show the death of a Reuters photographer and his assistant, who were unarmed.

The U.S. Army had rejected Reuters' earlier requests, including ones made under the Freedom of Information Act, to disclose the July 2007 video. Government sources told both Reuters and the Associated Press on … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Author and New York University professor Clay Shirky thinks he's getting old, or in other words, "my average age has been going up at the alarming rate of about one year per year." Recently, he said, he had to explain Napster to a class of his students because they were too young to have known much about the groundbreaking music-sharing service in its heyday.

But that wasn't the point. Shirky's talk on Sunday morning at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival was called "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,&… Read more

ContactKeeper isn't the sleekest, most stylish contact manager we've seen, but as a basic, easy-to-use program for keeping contacts up to date and in one place, it certainly fills the bill.

ContactKeeper's interface is sparse, but in a functional way. Intuitive buttons run across the top of the window for adding, opening, editing, and removing new contacts. Adding a contact is as easy as clicking the Add button and entering the name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and important notes for each new contact. Each new entry's details display clearly on the right … Read more

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA, pronounced "you-a-fa") is Europe's pro soccer governing body. It coordinates national leagues and international tournaments and championships, among other activities. The UEFA Informer is a free Windows Gadget that tracks UEFA football teams, matches, scores, fixtures, standings, and leagues in real time and delivers them to a customizable display that sits in the Windows desktop sidebar. It tracks all UEFA competitions and national leagues for some 51 countries, including Europe's "major leagues," the English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian domestic leagues.

This tiny gadget is a mere … Read more

Bento is a database app from the makers of Filemaker offering plenty of great features, but its deliberate lack of focus may make it difficult for people to grasp its usefulness. Bento is loaded with templates to create databases of people, places, or things using nice-looking graphics. The interface takes some time to get used to, but with a little poking around (and once the major features become clear), the true power of Bento starts to materialize.

Bento can be used to catalog just about anything in any number of ways. Comic book collectors could use the program to catalog … Read more

Database management applications have come a long way since Symantec introduced Q&A. Lantica's Sesame Database Manager is perhaps the best-known Q&A follow-on, and latest versions still provide an exclusive Q&A translator. Sesame is a cross-platform-capable, client-server database application development and management suite with built-in word processing and publishing capabilities that businesses, organizations, and even individuals can use to manage large amounts of data and create useful applications. These applications include invoices and receipts, reports, e-commerce, inventories, and virtually any kind of form or record.

Sesame's latest versions boast an upgraded form-based interface … Read more

Osk is a mediocre genealogy program that allows users to create basic family trees. Although it works, its lack of features and some functional problems left us unimpressed.

The program's interface is basic and intuitive enough, allowing users to add people and associate them with other family members. There's plenty of room to add information about each person, including video, images, and sound. However, when it came time to actually view the family tree, we were not impressed with the results. Although the program offers four formats for family trees, they ranged from confusing to downright nonsensical. There … Read more