Patent ID: 7100162

Claim:
A process task management system that is used within an operating system environment, comprising: an executing processes module containing a list of processes executing in the operating system environment; a status attribute for each process in the list, which represents an execution state of the process and is viewable by a user; a process state checking module configured to check the execution state of each process when the process is busy, and to set the status attribute for each process to inform the user whether the execution state of the process is busy and performing processing activity; and a file system activity module, coupled to the process state checking module, configured to check if the process is accessing a file system when the process is busy and to allow the process state checking module to determine that the user should be notified the process is busy but accessing the file system, wherein the process state checking module is in communication with a peripheral activity module that checks to see if the process is printing to a printer peripheral in order to determine whether the user should be notified that the process is busy accessing the printer peripheral.