Software Gadgets

You've had it happen. I know you have. You are trying to type an email or draft a report in Word when your system slows to a crawl as some application running in the background suddenly decides it needs to use 100% of your CPU and your system stops responding to what you are doing. You press Control-Alt-Delete to bring up task manager to see what is going on, but your system is so busy that task manager seems to take forever to appear. Process Tamer can help prevent this. This program watches for programs that hog the CPU and will lower their priority so other programs can still respond. The CPU hogging application will still get all the CPU time it wants, it just become interruptable by normal applications while it is being a CPU hog. This leaves your other programs much more responsive. When the offending program reduces its demands on your CPU, Process Tamer restores its original priority. Of course, there are programs you don't want to interfere with (e.g. your CD Burner). Process Tamer can be told to ignore such programs.

From the Process Tamer web site:

There are many times when a process will hog your cpu, such as when converting audio/video files, or working with compressed archives. Because these processes completely consume the cpu, your system becomes sluggish to respond and using the computer for other tasks becomes impossible while these processes are running.

Process Tamer solves this problem by identifying such these degenerate conditions and temporarily reducing the priority of the offending processes in order to allow your system to respond to other requests. Stop being a victim to an overloaded cpu - let Process Tamer keep your system responsive no matter what you're doing.

Process Tamer is written by the folks at Donation Coder. This means it is freeware, but donations are encouraged by requiring registration once every six months for the first year (then you get a free permanent registration) -- or once if you donate to the site. If you donate you get a registration code that works for every program on the site: forever. It's a fair way to do donationware and the site has been very successful in its first year.

Rating: 5.0 Stars
Operating System: Windows 2000 or XP
License: Donationware (Donations strongly encouraged, but not required)
Price: Free
Version Reviewed: 2.03.01
Web Site:
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html