In accordance...

In accordance with my last post, I am reducing the marketing 'mush' on my site. The number of buy now buttons has been cut in half and many stupid slogans removed. Let's cut to the chase on the site: Process Lasso does X, Y, and Z jobs - and it does them with absolutely minimal resource usage. More site changes coming.

Oh the toolbars..
At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I'll now switch subjects and make a mention of my next rant. Perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps next week, I'll rant (again?) about these toolbars you find included with everything you install anymore. I had no idea just how much they had infiltrated the market until recently. I once got a proposal to include one with Process Lasso - an offer I vehemently rejected. It will be an interesting story to share. We've all seen people with IE toolbars halfway down their screens, bless their souls. To me, adding to THAT problem, would be a-kin to selling my soul.

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Can users see through the hype?

I was just evaluating some PC tuning utilities out on the market. These utilities are so often of inferior quality and have absolutely no concern of whether they actually boost your PC's performance or not. In fact, I'd wager that only in rare circumstances do any of them improve your PC's performance. Remember, even Process Lasso's ProBalance is guaranteed only to help keep your system responsive during high loads - not magically make your PC twice as powerful.

You download demo versions of these other utilities and they find all these errors or 'faults' that need correcting in order to speed up your PC. They often have flashy user interfaces that consume enough RAM to have a negative impact on performance all by themselves.

Their core mission is to make the sale. It has made it harder for me, as I have to differentiate my software from snake oil. However, I think users aren't that dumb.. and can see through the hype, paid reviews, and SEO. Of course, I suppose I'm not really competing against these utilities, as I certainly don't claim to do what they do ;p

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Anti-virus software - the #1 cause of PC performance troubles

Many users realize their anti-virus software consumes massive amounts of system resources, and hope that Process Lasso will somehow keep it in check. Sadly, this is not the case. I've probably written about this 100 separate times, in various emails, blogs, and forum posts. I figured I'd write about it again, here. A more formal document on the subject is still forthcoming.

All major anti-virus, anti-malware, and other security software has an on-demand/real-time scanner. For simplicity, I'll refer to all these products as anti-virus software.

The on-demand scanner is responsible for checking every file that is accessed on your PC. This means every time any application (process) needs to open a file, it must first WAIT for the anti-virus software to scan the file. This is why you should NEVER lower the priority of anti-virus software, as the whole system has to wait on it to finish its job anyway.

To improve performance, the on-demand scanner caches already scanned files. Unfortunately, this consumes more virtual memory, and can cause performance troubles of its own on PCs with relatively low amounts of RAM. (Side note: Another common performance problem, especially for low-RAM systems, is resident processes with memory leaks.. but that's another subject).

Process Lasso excludes common anti-virus software from ProBalance restraint, but for rare anti-virus software, you may need to manually exclude it from ProBalance restraint if you see log entries indicating it has been periodically restrained.

My recommendation is to reconfigure your anti-virus software's real-time scanner so that it is less aggressive. For instance, you can reduce the types of files it scans, or the types of events it scans upon. For instance, if it is set to scan files when they are opened and closed, you can change it to only scan them when opened.

If you temporarily disable your anti-virus software's real-time (on-demand) scanner completely, or uninstall it, you will likely see a noticeable improvement in system performance. You may also want to experiment with different anti-virus software, as some performs better than others. However, NEVER install more than one anti-virus product at a time.. NEVER.

I personally don't even use anti-virus software's real-time scanning because I can't stand the performance impact.

HOWEVER,  I would be negligent to mention that you expose yourself to a little more risk if you disable or reduce your anti-virus software's on-demand scanning. If you are careful about what is introduced onto your PC, you can mitigate this risk. Make NO changes if you do not understand the risks I am speaking of. Instead, perhaps try different anti-virus software (but never at the same time). Some is known to perform MUCH better than others. Again, make NO CHANGES if you do not understand the risks and accept full responsibility for theoretical consequences of those changes (infection of some sort or another).

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Process Lasso v3.82.3 final

Update confusion
I released Process Lasso v3.82.3 a couple days ago. It has only a few very minor fixes and adjustments to the user interface. I did not feel this update warranted being pushed out to users of v3.82.2. To be clear, users of prior versions (i.e. v3.82.0) *would* get notified of this minor update.

Unfortunately, this caused some confusion, as I've had a few people ask me if the update system is broken. For that reason, I've decided to go ahead and push v3.82.3 out to all users - even those of v3.82.2. I am not sure if this is the right move or not, as I really hate to bother users with unnecessary updates.

What do you think? Should I always tell users of every update, no matter how minor -- or should I continue to leave it at my own discretion? Keep in mind that Process Lasso only checks for updates once a week, a parameter I intend to allow for changing when I finally finish the automated updates code.


My users are the best
I say this every post, but I have the best users in the world. Please, keep telling me of even the smallest anomalies in the user interface or elsewhere. I want a perfect product, and sometimes I miss the little user interface things in QA. I test the core engine well because its testing is automated, but the user interface is much more difficult to test since it requires manually going through each option, etc. I do code review, and try my best, but it is users who make the difference. Yes, I still haven't gotten over the pane positioning anomalies in the first builds of v3.80. Who knows how many users they cost me, and how badly my reputation was damaged. Worst, it hurt my self-confidence, but I'm recovering now. Nobody is perfect, and at least the quirk wasn't something critical like a memory leak.

Memory leaks in other applications
Speaking of memory leaks, I noticed one in a competitor's software the other day. I see these in so many applications. It is no wonder so many users have to reboot their computers daily! I know, I am far from perfect myself, but memory leaks are a serious issue that can cause severe performance degradation as the paging subsystem becomes overwhelmed. For the record, I am NOT speaking of Process Tamer, which is fine software written by my friend Mouser. I will not mention the competitor by name, as I don't want to talk badly of anyone.

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Process Lasso v3.82.2 final

I've released Process Lasso v3.82.2. This version cleans up a few small GUI items in v3.82. For Windows XP users, it removes that empty power scheme menu that appeared in v3.82.

Changes in v3.82.2 (since v3.82.0):

• [.2]Fix.GUI: Fixed pressing F1 was opening the help documentation twice
• [.2]Fix.GUI: Fixes to the behavior of 'Manage Processes of All Users' menu item toggle
• [.2]Fix.GUI: Fixed issue where the 'close governor too' message could be shown while Process Lasso is restarting due to a configuration change
• [.2]Fix.GUI: Toggling graph visibility was still inducing config file save and reload due to a code artifact
• [.2]Fix.GUI: Fixed power scheme management submenus weren't being deleted in XP/2K (first appeared in v3.82 due to menu re-arrangement)
• [.2]Change.GUI: After user manually resets language, only show languages whose backing files are installed

Version 3.82.1 was skipped due to a mistake in the initial release of it. Surprisingly, the warez guys got a-hold of it within the few minutes it was available, so some of you may see v3.82.1 on the warez sites.

Please be warned against using illegal copies of Process Lasso Pro. I've seen modified copies out there that use different update servers. Who knows what other modifications have been made. We sign all our executables, so be sure that signature is in-tact before using any copy of our software downloaded elsewhere. Even if the signature is valid, additions could have been made to the package, such as malware added. You are taking a chance, and given the low cost of our software, its a good recommendation to just buy a proper license.

As always, I thank all our loyal users. Without you, Process Lasso would not be what it is today. Your feedback, bug reports, and feature requests make the software what it is.

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ProBalance restrain by CPU affinity adjustment feature

I was working on some minor code maintenance, and thought I'd take this chance to remind users of the option to have ProBalance change the CPU affinity of offending background processes in addition to (or instead of) lowering their priorities. You can find this option in the 'ProBalance Parameters ...' from within the 'Options / ProBalance Settings' menu.

For most users, this isn't desirable or necessary. For some users, it may be just the trick. Its just another option to keep in mind.

Version 3.82 is coming some time today, as I'm nearly done with it.

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