There’s no Windows user that doesn’t want fast boot times, no slow-downs and a speedy, responsive system in general. An incredibly comprehensive application such as Process Lasso can significantly improve system performance. This free program allows users to establish priorities and CPU affinity for specific processes categorize them, decide how processes should behave and many other actions.
Installation & Requirements
During the installation users will have to choose which components they want to install (of course installing all of them is fine too). After Process Lasso is installed it offers essential setup options through several dialog windows. These mainly focus on defining automated startup and how to handle Windows users (if there is more than one).
Process Lasso runs on all versions of Windows 2000, 2003, XP, 2008, Vista, 7 and 8.
Interface
Process Lasso has an interface with an unrefined design, yet it is functional. Processes and related info are displayed as a list and you can see all of them or just the active ones. Below the list of processes a log shows all actions performed by the program. A real-time graph shows system resource usage above the processes list.
From here, things get tricky. A massive amount of options are available, starting with the context menu present in the process list. For any process, users can set current and default values for priority class, CPU affinity, I/O propriety and memory priority. The same menu offers even more settings, such as restart, terminate (including permanent termination), prevent sleep when running, limit number of instances and others.
There is also a Process Watchdog function, that lets users monitor their process for a specific behavior and set an action that should be executed when the condition is met. To be more specific, a process can be monitored to see if it goes over/under a user-defined CPU or virtual memory level. If the condition is true, then the set action (such as log occurrence, restart the process, set CPU priority, terminate the process…etc.) will be performed.
The main menu at the top also includes a huge list of settings. The Options category offers configuration settings for some general aspects of the program, such as default priorities for CPU, I/O and memory, application power profiles, processes to keep running and anti-sleep processes, to name a few.
It’s hard to go through all of Process Lasso’s features, since there are so many. Even power-users will need to study the program for a while to get an idea of what it can really do when used at full potential.
Pros
– Well-organized display of all processes/active processes and real-time resource usage graph.
– Offers full control over each process, allowing users to define process priority, behavior and other aspects.
– Multiple process termination options are available (including permanent termination).
– Any process can be kept running as well as prevent the computer from going to sleep while it’s running.
– The Process Watchdog function lets users create advanced process rules.
– Provides settings to automate Power Profile control.
Cons
– The free version of Process Lasso has many disabled features.
Alternatives
– Process Tamer
– Bill2’s Process Manager
Conclusion
Running Process Lasso with its default settings does offer a certain level of process optimization, but it’s a million miles away compared to what this program could do in the hands of an experienced user. As a result, anyone can use it but no one can get significant improvements to system performance and stability without diving into Process Lasso’s massive array of settings.
