Heya,

This is going to be a really small trick but hope you like it, it can save you a reboot at time

During my Odyssey to Microsoft windows xp followed by Microsoft Windows Vista i felt that there are times when the task manager neglects you and do not respond at all. But you know the process which might be killing your cpu or ram. Like it can be windows exporer, windows media player etc. So for that you can open the command line by going to start > run and type CMD there and hit enter. In the black window type

taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe

You can replace explorer.exe (process name) with whatever is buggy at that time. You can also kill the processes with their ID numbers (pid) but provided you know them, i believe they are not static so you cannot just recall them everytime. A small list of the applications with their process names is jotted below :

Windows Media Player wmplayer.exe

Microsoft Word winword.exe

Microsoft Excel excel.exe

Windows Explorer explorer.exe

Notepad notepad.exe

Command prompt cmd.exe

Remote desktop mstsc.exe

Internet Explorer iexplore.exe

Mozilla Firefox firefox.exe

Apache server apache.exe

Mysql Database mysqld.exe

There is another process with runs in windows Xp (not sure about vista) its called dumprep.exe and most of the time it hangs my system. Infact this process tried to dump some log files or memory to the temp files so that it can be recovered or reported back to the microsoft, but it makes the system slow and i would like to kill it as well. So you can try killing if, only if you dont have anything else to do

Cheers!!
Sachin Khosla