Process Hacker is, essentially, an advanced system information utility for Windows. It has long been the source of information for those curious about what's going on under the hood of their systems, providing "raw" information about all processes, services, network connections, kernel-mode drivers, threads, loaded modules, open handles and other system information that you would otherwise have to dig up from Task Manager or System Information, assuming you can find it at all. It's open-source and written by one person, and the source code is available on GitHub for anyone to audit or modify. It's been around long enough that a lot of users have come to rely on it as the main resource for getting a "deeper" look at the inner workings of Windows.
The interface is, on the surface, very intimidating. There's so many different columns, so many nested trees of processes, so many details. The information displayed is almost all presented in hexadecimal and in a lot of ways it's purposely not user-friendly: it's not made for the casual user who just wants to see how much CPU Windows Explorer is using. But spend 10 minutes with it and the underlying principle becomes evident: everything is grouped by and organized around the processes, threads, kernel and user mode drivers, network connections and other information that's actually running or enabled on the system. You can kill processes that won't close properly, view which handles (files, registry keys, etc.) a process has open, view GPU usage on a per-process basis, etc., either information that's hidden in deeper levels of other tools or not easily accessible at all through the built-in Windows GUI.
Empty Standby List is a small utility, perhaps only 50KB in size, that has one job: clearing the standby list of memory in Windows. The concept of standby memory is an attempt on Windows' part to speed up access to files you may be reusing: if you recently accessed certain files, or programs you have closed that you may reopen soon, Windows stores a copy of them in RAM as a "standby list". This is a list of items that can be "accessed" more quickly than a process reloading them from a hard drive, because they are in memory in RAM already. This can be a net positive for most users and doesn't appear to have any substantial downsides, but Windows can get a little aggressive sometimes about what it puts in the standby list, particularly on systems with limited RAM. It's not uncommon for 4GB systems in particular to have a standby list that takes up the vast majority of RAM in the system. The problem is, that RAM technically "counts" as being in "available" memory for the system even though it's being used for the standby list and Windows doesn't actually free it up to other processes until it's needed. It's only when programs demand memory (when a game loads new assets, for instance) that Windows needs to actually flush out the standby list, which can result in stuttering for a few seconds while this happens.
Empty Standby List is a tiny utility which, as its name suggests, empties the standby list of a computer, also part of the same collection of applications. In order to understand why you’d even need such a tool, you must know the basic concepts of Windows memory management. Windows RAM can be in different states — used, free, modified, standby, etc. Standby memory is a cached list of pages which have been read from the disk and which the system expects to need again soon, so it keeps them ready for use.
The "WJ" branding comes from the developer, wj32, on GitHub. He created these utilities as more personal side projects that wound up being much more helpful than he originally anticipated. Process Hacker was first developed in 2008-2009, originally intended as a more lightweight alternative to Microsoft's Sysinternals Process Explorer. It eventually became a lot more expansive, and has been continuously developed over the years. It's far from one of those abandoned utilities that only gets patched for Windows 7.
Empty Standby List will empty this cache for you on demand. All of the above memory will be available in the free list, so your computer can use it to run applications without a reboot. Not something you’d run all the time, but it’s quite handy to have for those situations when you need to free up memory without rebooting and RAM usage is high, but Task Manager tells you it’s mostly “cached” and you still experience sluggishness. Many users automate this so it’s run before a game or a memory-intensive application starts.
The common thread between all three utilities is that they're small and not overambitious in what they set out to do. Process Hacker isn't an antivirus or a system optimizer. Empty Standby List has a singular, focused job. WJ's Backup doesn't try to intelligently guess what you want to back up or when, or provide a "smart AI-powered" backup feature, etc. They're very "lean" utilities that each have their own area of specialization. I honestly appreciate that, even if it's somewhat old-fashioned in today's software landscape where so many utilities try to do everything and cost $10 a month.
Jobs can be configured to point to source directories and backup destinations, a schedule can be defined if the backup needs to be run automatically, and incremental mode is supported, so your backup won’t waste time and space by copying all of the files each time the backup is run. It’s portable and does not need to be installed, which means you can copy it to a USB stick and run it from there if you like (great for creating backups for multiple computers without having copies on all of them).
It also uses timestamps to track what files have changed, skips copying of files which already exist in the destination directory, maintains the original directory structure of files, and more. There is no cloud integration or any built-in encryption (it’s both a potential downside and a pro, depending on who you ask), which helps keep it simple and focused, and of course, fast.
All three of these applications are free, portable, and no-nonsense utilities which do their jobs and get out of the way. They have no telemetry, no nonsense “updates”, no subscription or nagware, and they work on Windows and don’t require registration. WJ’s Backup, Process Hacker and Empty Standby List are quite the unsung heroes of software, if you ask me. It’s not flashy and they’re rather old, but they fill their roles exceptionally well, have clear interfaces and are free as in freedom. They’re exactly what you want, if you are that sort of user who likes to see what processes and threads are using memory and resources, if you need a utility to kill a stubborn process that won’t close, if you want an on-demand tool to free up some RAM without rebooting, if you just like software you can trust, and if you need a simple file backup solution that will do incremental backups without being a garbage heap of features.