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There has been some understandable user confusion about Process Lasso, so first let's clear up a few common misconceptions. If your question isn't answered here, then see the FAQ below.
Misconception #1: Process Lasso is yet another super-charged task managerNO! Process Lasso is NOT a task manager at all. It has some task management capabilities, but its not meant to replace a task manager. Its meant to act in the background, automatically enforcing rules upon processes in order to improve your system responsiveness (or for whatever other purpose you desire).
Misconception #2: Process Lasso needs to be tweaked for your specific computerProcess Lasso is designed so that it operates well on any system without ANY configuration changes. You simply need to let Process Lasso's ProBalance do its thing - automatically lowering priorities of certain processes under specific conditions. There is no need to change any settings at all. Could you theoretically get a little more responsiveness out of your PC by changing Process Lasso settings? Yes.. but the additional gains would be marginal and it would require an expert and lots of trial and error to know what changes are appropriate for your specific PC. Therefore, its best to not make any changes - play it safe. This way, you know you get the benefits of ProBalance and can be sure of no harmful side-effects induced by inappropriate configuration changes.
Misconception #3: A user needs to set default priorities on their processes to rank their importance.NO, PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. The idea isn't to reprioritize all your processes, rating them in importance to you. Doing that is risky and harmful to your PC performance. Just let Process Lasso do its job, UNLESS you know what you are doing.
Misconception #4: Process Lasso is only for geeksNo, its for anyone with a computer. Most people should simply install it and 'forget about it'. It'll be there, doing its job. Its interface may seem technical, but you don't ever have to use its interface. It just works.
Misconception #5: Process Lasso is only for older computersIt may be true that older computers get the most benefit from Process Lasso, but Process Lasso is helpful to even brand new 'top of the line' PCs. Additionally, its extra features are quite handy for anyone (such as anti-sleep processes and High Performance Power processes). Those with a lot of CPU cores may also enjoy the default CPU affinty feature, where they can limit programs to specific CPUs - keeping the others free for use by other procesess.
Misconception #6: Process Lasso makes things run FASTERDo NOT expect Process Lasso (or any other utility) to make things run faster. Instead, Process Lasso's ProBalance will help prevent micro-lags, mouse jerkiness, and other related problems. Please do not confuse speed with responsiveness. Here are Bitsum, we don't BS around. Our software does what it does, and is no magic elixr that can solve every PC problem or make your PC two years newer :).
First, its worth noting that there's a real problem here with jargon. Non-technical users may seem overwhelmed. I'll try to switch between technical jargon and layman terms to help give some contextual reference that may aid in deducing the meaning of jargon.
If the question you have isn't here, or isn't answered well enough here, send an email to Bitsum Technologies.
Yes, home and academic users can freely use it for as long as they want. However, after the product has been installed a while, a couple features are disabled and some nags are shown to encourage the user to upgrade to Process Lasso Pro. These nags are tolerable, as they are meant to be reminders, not to annoy. Even after this point, the software is still quite usable and not by any means crippled. These actions help us to continue to publish a free edition. We encourage you to give Process Lasso a try. It may be just what you need, and the Pro build may be well worth the price of a couple cheese burgers.
When you run a program on your computer, it creates a process. Every program you have running is represented by a process. When you have multiple copies of a program running, it has multiple processes. For instance, if you were to run Microsoft Word, it would create a process named 'msword.exe'. Each process has its own memory and threads (you can think of threads as tasks for your CPU to execute). Furthermore, each process is isolated from other processes, so that a crash in one program won't cause a crash in another.
While there isn't a built in shortcut key to show the Process Lasso main window, you can easily add one yourself. To do this, right click on the Process Lasso start menu shortcut and select 'Properties'. There is a field 'shortcut key'. Using that field, you can assign Process Lasso a shortcut key (i.e. CTRL+ALT+K). Now when you press that shortcut combination, you'll see Process Lasso's main window pop up.
Since anti-virus software processes are sensitive to priority adjustments, many common anti-virus softwares are excluded from restraint. Consider the real-time scanner of your anti-virus software. Whenever a file is opened, the process opening the file must WAIT for the scanning to complete. So, you don't want to lower the priority of the real-time scanner, as that would not make things happen quicker. In fact, it would have just the opposite effect. Other software isn't as careful as Process Lasso, but we wanted to DO THINGS RIGHT! .. even if it means sometimes people think that the product isn't not working because it skips a process that is using a lot of CPU.
If your anti-virus software isn't on our hard-coded exclusion list, that's no big deal because it probably would never get acted on anyway. However, if you see Process Lasso's ProBalance acting upon it, then you may want to exclude it from restraint. Most of the time, this isn't an issue since ProBalance would only act on a non-excluded critical process of anti-virus software under rare conditions. In the majority of cases, the default settings themselves implicitly exclude critical anti-virus processes.
This line represents the CPU history of the process(es) you have currently selected. Yes, this is not indicated on the graph legend.
For more information, see How Does Process Lasso's Restraint Work?
CD/DVD Burners typically don't use enough of the processor to be restrained, as they are usually waiting on disk or optical drive I/O. It is actually more likely that a buffer underrun would be prevented by Process Lasso because if you were in such a high-load situation, the other offending processes would have their priorities lowered, there-by giving the burning application more access to CPU cycles. Even if the burning process itself got lowered in priority, it'd be no worse off than without Process Lasso since the other active processes would surely have been lowered as well, there-by giving it equal footing, as it had originally.
Also, some burners raise their own priority and Process Lasso will NOT lower the priority of processes that have raised their own priorities, depending on the configuration of Process Lasso.
The bottom line is: Process Lasso is most likely to HELP, and even in a worst case scenario it shouldn't make things worse. That said, adding Optical Burning apps to the Process Restraint Exclusions list is probably a good idea, but far from necessary.
Process Lasso was designed to, above all, 'do no harm'.
Sometimes applications like to control their own priorities. Process Lasso doesn't try to fight with them, instead only making a single attempt to set the default priority and/or affinity for the process. If you want Process Lasso to aggressively and forcibly enforce your default priorities and affinities, forced mode will do that. If you have a process that isn't staying at the default priority or affinity, you can use this option. It should be noted though that application that set their own priorities or affinities may be doing so for a good reason.
When this is enabled for a process, Windows temporarily boosts the priority of threads for that process under certain conditions (when it leaves a wait state). For specific information, see this MSDN page about Windows dynamic thread priority boosting. Turning this off can severely impact the performance of applications that have a graphical user interface (a window). For background applications, this setting is not usually important.
That indicates whether or not Windows dynamic thread priority boosting is enabled for that process (see other question about thread priority boosting for explanation).
Yes! It is fully compatible with Windows 7. In fact, our primary development machine is now running Windows 7.
Alternatively, you could chose to run the Process Lasso core engine as a system service, instead of a service under a specific user account.
For most other editions of Windows, run 'secpol.msc' and edit "Local Security Policies \ User Rights Assignment \ Logon as a service".
In Windows 7, this issue sometimes happens when you change your Process Lasso installation option from Highest rights to Normal rights. You must reboot your computer to resolve the problem. It seems that Windows 7 can cache the application security settings, resulting in the inability of the GUI to launch the core engine.
To fix this (with some side effects, read below), go to the Control Panel, Regional and Language Settings, Advanced Tab. There, change the default language for non-unicode programs to whatever your selected language is. This problem is because not all of Process Lasso has (yet) been converted to unicode, so the proper system locale must be set for string conversions to work correctly. However, making this change may mean that your other applications don't use the correct character set, so be careful! An alternative may be just to use English, if you are able to read it.
The working set is the amount of physical memory (RAM) that a process is currently consuming. The commit size (aka commit charge) is the total amount of virtual memory, excluding certain special types of allocations, that is allocated. The commit size includes virtual memory that is residing on the page file(s) and/or in physical memory (RAM). Since some types of memory are not counted in the commit size, it is possible for the working set size to be greater than the commit size.
The private working set is the amount of unshared memory a process has allocated. This metric excludes shared pages that may be mapped into (sharded amongst) several processes.