As soon as the hardware manufacturers come up with a really powerful processor, faster storage media or the high performance RAM modules, the software firms develop software that seems to make more and more use of the system resources. At times, it appears to be a cat and mouse game – even if you buy the latest and fastest computer system, the software always becomes more resource hungry in 1-2 years. It inevitably results in you sitting in front of an unresponsive computer screen waiting for something to happen. I actually have a 4 year old PC with a dual core processor that came with Windows 7 installed on it and now with Windows 10 upgrade it does not work as smoothly as before, not to mention the occasional hanging up of the system when you just have to wait it out.
The makers of the popular Process Lasso have found the solution with their new product called CPUBalance. It keeps your system responsive even when some process decides to squeeze every drop of juice from your CPU. It can prevent system hang ups even in very extreme system overload conditions in which you would have to press the reset button otherwise.
It keeps running in the background and throttles the attempts of any process to push the CPU usage to 100% and thus prevents system from becoming unresponsive. As soon as it detects that a process is drawing too much power from the CPU, it steps in and changes the priority of that process so that other processes can also use the CPU optimally. You can actually see the system responsiveness in terms of a percentage (100% is the best) and a list of all the processes that were restrained to keep the system responsive.
In the settings you can modify the threshold when the CPUBalance should kick in. By default, CPUBalance starts to adjust the process priorities when system wide CPU usage reached 75%, or when a single process is taking up as much as 65% of the CPU usage. These adjustments continue until the CPU usage by each of processes drops down to 15%. The default settings work fine for everyone, but you can change them as per your requirements.
Verdict: CPUBalance is a really effective cure for the Windows PC hangups. It can keep your system responsive no matter how many processes are running in your computer and how much they try to hog your processor.
You can download CPUBalance from https://bitsum.com/cpubalance/.
@Allan Winston, this might be true for the Word/Excel/Web browser folks… but power users like programmers, video editors, etc. can easily run into this problem. How well this program works is another story, but so far seems so good.
However , the first thing to investigate is your ram usage. if you are using most of your ram, the CPU gets way over taxed. reducing ram usage is the way to go there. One way to do that is using extensions like OneTab (ff/chrome) or “Tabs limiter with queue” for chrome – this is because, especailly chrome – due to its architecture is a memory super hog
I suppose this utility might have some benefit for low-end machines, but my experience using Windows Resource Monitor is that CPU is rarely a significant restraint. That is because medium- to high-end computers have multiple CPUs, so that even if one process went into a CPU loop, there will be additional CPUs available to run the other processes.
The main CPU bottleneck I have seen on my computer is Firefox – when running a moderate to large number of tabs. However, if you constrained Firefox, then the browser wouldn’t respond!
A much more significant bottleneck I have found using Windows Resource Monitor is disk activity.