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FARR Plugins and Aliases / Re: Post your FARR v2 Plugin Idea Requests Here - Plugin Writers Read In
« Last post by mouser on April 12, 2007, 03:07 PM »I was thinking this myself, but not as a plugin, as a core feature..
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6.1 A Free Utility That Stops Programs From Hogging Your PC
It was driving me mad. My laptop would sporadically run at 100% CPU utilization and lock up. It defied all attempts at analysis as the PC was seized and I couldn't do anything. Only a hard reboot was possible, but on rebooting the problem was gone.
Eventually I solved it with a superb little utility called Process Tamer, written by "Mouser" over at Donation Coder. Process Tamer is a monitor that watches the CPU utilization of all running processes. Once the usage of a single process gets above a certain level (by default 70%) Process Tamer reduces the usage by lowering the process priority.
It's a simple idea and Process Tamer implements it immaculately. With Process Tamer installed, the next time the problem occurred on my laptop it didn't totally lock up but rather just ran very slowly. This allowed me to do a quick diagnosis. The problem turned out to be simple but non-obvious. Two programs, Diskeeper and X1, had been accidentally scheduled to start at the same time and were getting into an embrace of death. It was unexpected, as these two normally peacefully co-exist. Simply re-scheduling the programs to start at different times solved the problem.
I couldn't have solved the problem as easily without Process Tamer. However Process Tamer has much broader application than just this kind of problem.
It's a great tool for preventing any one program from hogging your processor. Every user has experienced the situation where their PC has been slowed down to the point of being unusable, by a background program such as a desktop search program, that starts and takes all the resources. Process Tamer will stop that from ever happening again.
For the same reason it can also help speed up your Windows Startup. Make sure though, that you enable Process Tamer to start automatically with Windows. By default it does not, but it's easily changed from within the program's options.
Yet another use for Process Tamer is intra-server load balancing. It's near ideal for this task.
If you actually want a program to able to use all available resources, such as a digital editing program, you can set the program to be excluded from Process Tamer's watchful eye.
I was so impressed with Process Tamer that I've permanently installed it on my laptop. It takes only around 6MB of memory space and its own CPU usage is so low I could barely measure it.
Process Tamer is available for free from the Donation Coder site. They use a novel licensing system: you have to register to get a free license key which allows you to download any number of programs on the site. This key lasts six months after which you must return to the site to download another free license key. After a year you are given a permanent license. Alternatively, you can make a once-up donation of any size and get a permanent key straight away. It's a clever and ethical way to encourage users to recognize the work done by freeware authors and I support it fully. I donated generously and I hope you do too.
Donationware, Windows 2K, XP, 2.23MB
https://www.donation...proctamer/index.html
In addition to today being "Patch Tuesday", it's also the day that Microsoft officially pulls the plug on support for Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 1a for Windows XP. If you're unsure what version of XP you're running, go to Start and right click the My Computer icon and select Properties. The version will be displayed in the System section of the property sheet. If you want to continue receiving critical security updates and patches, update to SP2 that was released on September 17, 2004.
Back pain and neck pain information for patients
In-depth, peer reviewed back pain information written by physicians specifically for patients with back pain and neck pain
For many months now we've been asked questions about what the plans are for the next release of SMF - what features it will have and when it will be available. We are now in a position to answer some of these questions. Simple Machines is proud to announce that the next version of SMF will be version 2.0 - in recognition of the scale of the changes implemented since SMF 1.1.
SMF 2.0 represents a significant step forward from the current version of SMF and has been in development alongside SMF 1.1 since December 2005. As well as adding new features SMF 2.0 makes considerable changes "under the hood" with improved caching, database abstraction and a move towards "Model, View, Controller" functions to improve integration and simplify mod writing. Whilst we are reluctant to announce all the features for this upcoming version the ones currently implemented include:
- Database abstraction - with support for PostgreSQL and SQLite planned alongside that of MySQL.
- Automatic installation of packages into themes other than just the default.
- Email templates to simplify customization of forum emails.
- Moderation center including post, topic and attachment moderation - to allow approving of user content before it is made public.
- User warning system.
- Additional group functionally including group moderators and requestable/free assignable groups.
- WYSIWYG editor to provide an intuitive user interface to those users not familiar with BBC.
- Permission improvements such as group inheritance and permission profiles to further reduce the complexity of the permissions system.
- File based caching for a performance increase on all forums regardless of whether an accelerator is installed.
- Mail queuing system to stagger the sending of emails to improve performance on large forums.
- Advanced signature settings to allow the administrator of a forum to more tightly control the contents of users signatures.
- Personal messaging improvements including ability to automatically sort incoming messages and a variety of display options.
- Improved upgrade script with better timeout protection and simpler user interface.
- Custom profile fields to enable administrators to add additional member fields from the administration center.
This is only a handful of the many improvements made in 2.0. Whilst we are not able to commit to a firm timetable for release of 2.0 we are hoping to get an initial beta in the hands of our Charter Members come June this year, with the first public beta likely to be around late October.
