Make your applications play nice
November 17th, 2008
Computers just beg you to do a bunch of stuff at once. Surf the web, download email, recalculate a spreadsheet, and more. Sometimes, though, your machine slows to a crawl. Usually when this happens, it's because there's one program—one process—that's taking up more than its fair share of your computer's processor—its brain. Download a big file, for example, and everything else may come to a screeching halt. Who knew that one job could cause everything else to have to sit there and wait. For Windows systems, there is a solution to this problem.
Process Lasso is a tool that monitors your system and what it's doing. It keeps track of which programs are using your CPU's time, and when it sees one of them hogging resources, it can automatically lower its priority, making it "play nice" with the other applications that are trying to run. You can manually configure it as well, to lower the priority on apps you run in the background. Now you can get the stuff you're working on done, while background tasks slow down and take their time.
Process Lasso is a Windows application. It runs under Win2k or later.
I use Process Tamer. http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html
Thanks for the linkage Liam
Glad to see a true “free” option that seems to work similar.
just a comment back, i havent used this app, but Process Tamer does seem quite nice, and effective. I’ve seen no problems with it thus far.
It does what it says it does (which seems to be the same as this blogged app).