Suspending / Changing Priority

[Mickets]

First of all: I admit that I haven't yet read the help file. Yes, I know that's bad. But I already copied it on to my phone to read on my way home...

I made a search and found a couple of topics here and here, but couldn't exactly find the answer I needed.

So I'll bother you anyway with a question, because I need some quick advice.

I am used to using a bunch of software on my computer, and then for some reason I have to do something else. And instead of shutting down those programs that are processor-hungry, I'd simply suspend them via DTask Manager. This would avoid me spending time shutting down the applications, saving configurations, then reloading them etc.

It has always worked nicely (with the software I've used it on: some work software, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc).

Now, coming to Process Lasso, today I noticed that my computer was hanging up for minutes, several times in a row. It was driving me nuts. PL is running its default configuration, but I decided to fiddle around with those processes I mentioned before that are CPU hungry.

Questions:

• Although I could select various processes in the list, I can't access the Suspend option with multiple-selections. I understand that this may be a means to avoid trouble, so...
• Instead, I lowered the processes' priorities down to idle. It helped to some extent. Is this the best approach?
• Today, one of the processes with highest CPU usage is the weekly TuneUp defragmenting of the harddrive. This may obviously have a great effect on the computer's responsiveness. I lowered its priority down to Idle, just for me to be able to finish typing some things (including this post). But Windows would still be very un-responsive, and even PL wouldn't respond at some times. Even at "idle", the defragmentation service was using something like 30% CPU. As soon as I suspended it, Windows started responding again. What would be the best approach to keep Windows responsive while defragmentation is happening?

I am using Windows XP SP3, PL Pro v5.1.0.21a

Thanks for any advice.

Michael

[Jeremy Collake]

Your habit of suspending processes is not a good one. It is an extremely unnatural state for a process to be in, and can cause complications. I would also advise *against* lowering the priorities of processes haphazardly.

In this case, the cause is uncertain, but could be related to excessive memory consumption by one or more processes. This would create an excessive amount of page faults (page in operations), which would require disk I/O, and that's likely where you'll find the bottleneck.

What is the total RAM utilization % as shown by Process Lasso? Can you also please confirm your version of Process Lasso again? I'm just making sure it is .21a and you did not mean .27a.