Those who are using windows XP or windows vista experience the system resource issues. I don't know how much windows 7 users are facing this and what they do about it. As far as i know they're having balanced resources and i don't think it has issues like vista and windows XP. Windows XP also shows BSD less times than previous versions of windows. I don't even remember it is showing these days. But there are system resource issues with it none the less. For example, using firefox for entire day consumes a lot of RAM and page file memory this you can experience if you start any game after this. I have the same issues with the stuff and for the same reason i have decided to use a process priority application that can solve this issue. I found process tamer just to solve this problem. Before process tamer i used demo of process priority which is much bigger program that uses its own resource for running. There was also less improvement in the running resources as well. So i don't think it did job good and so not worthy of using or buying anymore. Plus anymore usage is paid by the way. It is shareware program so i was looking for free alternative for the applications. I have also tested alternative applications such as - process master. This is free program and less updated these days. You can access this program from angelfire website and you can also use it for free on win32 based setup. I don't know if it supports current win 64 installation so i have no idea about it. You should read the respective page. That aside, let me come back to process tamer.

Process tamer is free application with less footprint of it's own. It has size of about 140k and runs smoothly on desktop. It also takes less RAM and lets you force specific programs over another. You can schedule priority as well with percent of resource allocation. You can set when to free up resource if it consumes less or more memory. There are some more things to configure depending on your needs. If any process goes to take too much resource, it lowers it's priority until CPU processes are taking less load, so that way you're keeping process tamed. Once started it goes in the system tray and from there you can manage the system resources and modify the configurations. You can also exclude or add high priority processes in this list. I have found that process tamer is much better way to handle resources. You can check out process tamer.

I love this name, "process tamer"!
I'm so familiar, as a Unix user, to "kill -9" each process I don't understand how useful it is, that I'm happy seing such a tool for Windows!

'kill', shame it isn't that easy in windows lol

My previous windows machine was an old throw-out from college when I was a student there, I had to get three of them just to salvage parts to create one working machine lol and I used it for a long time with an OEM copy of Windows Proffesional on it. It had a pentium 4, viglen bios and an old phoenix board with 768mb ram, three hdd (30gb, 20gb, 10gb) and a cdrom drive (I removed the floppy). Now this had a serious problem with system resources becoming drained and being forced to reboot every now and then, although like you said it was a lot better than previous versions of windows. After a while I got a laptop with Vista home on it and although it was actually faster than the XP home it had the same problem. It was a lot less gradual drain on resources than xp home but still it eventually it would require a reboot.

Now I'm running a pc tower with the latest version of Vista Business Edition, when I bought the pc I ran a windows update like you do and there was only two security updates which was a bonus (I'm sure you guys have experienced a fresh install update of an older copy of windows, it can take hours lol). This new pc has been running now for 3 weeks and I've had no drain on resources at all. I've not had to reboot or power off at all so it would seem Microsoft are finally starting to get things right. Hopefully the problem has been fully resolved in Win7 and if not then maybe when 8 comes out, but for now I'm happy using my business edition of vista.

Process Tamer sounds perfect though for my older windows machine. I was considering wiping it and throwing a debian distro on there, but I'll give Process Tamer a go as there as I've gathered up a small collection of different softwares which I really can't be bothered hunting for again lol. I might however just go with the debian distro then turn it in to a server machine.

Last time I had a look at it, it was included in Microsoft Services for Unix.
This thing installs nfs for windows, which is very useful if you want to create files on the Unix system, do Excel things from your PC and have the result in the same Unix filesystem.
And, as far as I remember, "ps" is also there, as well as "tar", "cpio" or "kill".
A very useful thing for people collaborating "the unix way".
But nfs vs samba is another debate, maybe we should open another thread for it. Nevertheless, "ps" should be found there and is very useful for some geeks.

Here is the screenshot for those who are yet to decide on this software. It lists some of my processes in the process tree. You can check out there are not much in the list as of now. But when we open those web developer apps like photoshop and other stuff. List goes up and in such case process tamer is useful. I have noticed that you can give priority based on some rules. This may sound like unix style rule based killing. I don't know if it's there but i guess most of the unix terminal commands have such ways to kill process, maybe it was inspired from that.

At the bottom you can see there are options to kill process based on the CPU usage. You can also wipe out old processes which are not running in the task manager. That is good feature. Take a look at some of the configurations. I have not done much with it because i have no ideas if these options are in any way useful for me. So i just skipped them. I also don't want the program to start with the windows and only want it to run when i use some heavy games or applications. There is an option for the killing balloon messages. You should use it especially if you're working or running some games. The balloon tips can be annoying as they pop up every now and then when your using some CPU sensitive apps and these apps usually take more random resources and tamer flashes the tips. SO better to turn them off.

Hope other windows users find it useful for their desktop setups. :-)

RUP, XP, Waterfall play great roal in large software projects, and we must choose the right process and modify it correctly in a certain project. But is it important when design or develop website? Or there is no cooperative work need to do when designning or developing website? ...more

Hi, This tutorial will be as short and sweet (hopefully) as the one on Changing Graphical Login to Text Based. Those who are using Linux regularly would have definitely come across the system runlevels and al ...more

I am having quite the time spawning a process under a different user context. My preferred method involves using the Windows API functions LogonUser() and CreateProcessAsUser() but I have not figured out a way to overcome several error messages. I also have the particular problem of running my pro ...more