Increasingly, new versions of Windows are steering users well clear of the guts of the operating system. This is generally a good thing, since it reduces the number of support problems and makes the operating system more stable and reliable. But if you do want to delve under the cover, there are third party tools available that will let you do it, even on older versions of Windows. One such tool is WinTasks 4 Professional, which was written to do one thing and do it well.

That one thing is the control of process priorities. Put simply, using WinTasks 4 Professional you can decide whether a particular process - i.e. application or part of an application - is treated as being of high, normal or low importance. Those with a 'high' ranking will be given more CPU time and so will run faster, while those with a 'low' ranking will have to wait their turn in the processor queue.

Why does this matter? Because there may be some programs, running in the background on your PC, that don't really need to be updated by the CPU every few milliseconds. And by reducing them to a lower priority, you can free up some precious CPU cycles for use by more complex, demanding applications.

As an example, you might want to boost the performance of your DVD software while watching a movie and decrease any background tasks to low priority, so that the movie is decoded more effectively and the picture is of a higher quality. Alternatively, you might want to concentrate on application performance while reducing media performance to a minimum - so that you can work faster.

WinTasks 4 Professional lets you do both these things, and you can set presets within the program for each configuration; one called 'Movies' and one called 'Work', for example. The software shows all the running processes, so you can decide exactly which ones you want to manipulate. This is also handy for finding out what's running on your PC, so you can remove stealth spyware and other unwelcome programs.

Other features include a tool for deciding which programs are loaded at startup, a statistics window that shows CPU and memory usage over a user-determined time period (so you can watch for resource-hungry applications) and a scripting tool. This latter is particularly useful, since it lets you write conditional routines that will come into effect at a particular time.

For example, you may set a condition that whenever the CPU utilisation goes above 80%, and the Windows Media Player is running, the priority of the player is reduced. Or you can set a program to load whenever another program loads, or set Internet Explorer to close down whenever a particular Web site is visited.

Verdict
WinTasks 4 Professional is definitely aimed at the experienced user. It's possible to do quite a bit of (hopefully temporary) damage if you don't know what you're doing, but equally it's possible to improve your PC's performance for specific tasks without shelling out for new hardware. It's not going to turn an old office desktop into a fast games machine, but it could extend the working life of some PCs for a while.

Company: LIUtilities

Contact: +46 63 108 830

Tags: central processing unit microsoft windows windows windows media player personal computer computer program programming tool shareware