Runaway Processes on Windows: Bring in the Bounty Hunter

If you use Windows, you've had it happen. Your machine just stops responding to much of anything, often even the mouse. You wave the mouse around a bit, hit a few keys on the keyboard: nothing. A few seconds later, all of those motions happen at once on the screen.

Other times, you manage to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and see why it slowed down and there, staring you in the face is something like Firefox, chewing up 100% of the CPU time. For an app like that, it's not too bad as it will let up soon enough, but this kind of runaway monopolization of CPU time can get in the way of getting things done if you run lots of stuff simultaneously.

Enter Process Tamer. This little app, from the same folks who brought you my chosen screenshot solution, watches for anything that tries to peg the CPU and steps in. It lowers the runaway process' priority, which lets everything else kick back in. Later, it looks to see if said process is now behaving itself and restores it to its previous priority level.

I've been running it for a couple of weeks now and find myself just on the verge of irritation with slowdowns only to see the little notice in the system tray that it took care of it.