Tiny Utilities : Small is Good – III

Welcome to the the third installment of my Tiny Utilities series. In each installment I take a lot at three extremely useful yet free utilities which are less than 2MB in size.

Process Lasso from Bitsum Technologies is a tiny utility that can save you some headaches. Its objective is simple – to prevent a problematic application from freezing your system. It does that by quietly running in the background and monitoring the CPU usage of all applications. If any application starts using up abnormal amount of CPU resources then Process Tamer reduces the priority of that application. This prevents those familiar situations where your computer stops responding because a single application is using 99% of CPU resources. Process Lasso itself has a small memory footprint and can work in invisible mode. Certain applications (example: games or video encoders) require high CPU resources to function properly. No need to worry – you can ask Process Lasso to exclude those applications from it’s purview by adding those processes to the exclusion list.

Download Process Lasso (500 KB)
Platforms Supported : Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista
Version Reviewed : 2.30

Another similar software is Process Tamer. However, it doesn’t qualify in this series as it is larger than 2MB. As far as functionality is concerned both utilities are identical. I use Process Tamer, but I recommend both. It’s really a matter of personal preference.

TeraCopy is a tiny utility which essentially allows you to copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. A part from that TeraCopy has other handy features like the ability to pause and resume transfers. The best thing about Teracopy is that during batch transferring files, if transfer of one of the file fails due to some reason it simply skips the file and moves on to the next file. Windows Explorer on the other hand simply terminates the entire operation. Teracopy works with Windows Explorer as well as Total Commander. TeraCopy is free for personal use.

Download TeraCopy (504 KB)
Version Reviewed : 1.1

AMP WinOFF is an award winning utility that allows you to automate system shutdown. AMP Winoff supports various shut down modes (shut down, restart, log off, power off, suspend, hibernate and lock computer). You can even use it to hang up your modem. Power users would appreciate the plethora of options offered by AMP WinOFF.

Download AMP WinOFF (452 KB)
Version Reviewed : 4.21