Latest Forum Posts
It was driving me madIt 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.
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.
The 2007 Getting Organized Experiment (GOE) Freeware Programming Challenge
This page lists the freeware programs created during our 2007 Getting Organized Experiment Programming Challenge. The programs are inspired by our Getting Organized Experiment series where we explore systems and tools for becoming more organized and maximizing our productivity. Coders are instructed simply to creae a small free utility that, loosely defined, relates in some way to heling people work more efficiently.
Getting Organized 2007 Programming Challenge - RESULTS NOW AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD In order to help encourage some coders who hang out at DC to write some new freeware productivity software, we had a little coding challenge in November as part of our "Getting Organized Experiment." The results are now online for anyone to download and use for free. The challenge was:
We received almost a dozen fun entries, including some really interesting and useful ones. Check them out and please send a thanks to the authors if you like what they've done.
Click here to read more about the new free programs and download them now.. |
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EvaluweightHaving trouble justifying a decision?
Stop procrastinating and start using Evaluweight ! This started out as a little fun and bit of effort to scam mouser of one of the legendary Cody Mugs. In the end it is a interesting insight into how we come to a conclusion. Theory: Each decision you make, is a 100 percent commitment. Therefore, that decision can be broken down into categories, and each category represents a part of that 100 percent commitment. So "evaluweight" lays this all out in a nice and easy grid format. Simply give each category/feature a percentage mark of how it would impact your total commitment. Now add the product that you want to compare, and in each category, mark that product out of 10 on how it meets your expectation. |
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AnotherOneDoneWhat it does: Helps you keep track of your progress with a numerical goal, such as the amount of books you want to read, blog posts you want to make, batches of cookies you want to bake, etc. Features:
How to use:
Download here
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HowLong2ItHowLong2It is a way to keep track of how many days since some date in the past and how many days until some date in the future. The applications is always only a click away. Click on the tray icon and the status window will popup to show you the dates/tasks you are tracking. I have setup a webpage for it. It is based of an idea from spankymcgee. This is an odd entry, because I built it, and everything related to it (the web page etc.) in about a total of less than 24 man hours. I hadn't planned on entering this contest, but Friday I decided what I could do using AutoIt in the time remaining. I will be doing a heck of a lot of work on this over the next few days to weeks. Right now all that is there is the executable file. There is no installation necessary. There is no documentation at this point, so it will be the first thing I do starting... now.
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Timer AssistI am posting here my application which was made for a request on DC Forum:
I work at a hospital and have to chart the patient's vitals every 15 minutes after surgery. This has to be done at 15 past the hour, 30 minutes past the hour 45 minutes past the hour and on the hour. |
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SMAU - Simple Multi-Alarm UtilitySMAU is a handy tool for creating and managing Alarms, which you set to execute an Action at a given Time, where both Action and Time can have a very broad meaning.
The main purpose of the program is to increase user's efficiency when working with a computer by reminding him or her of important things that need to be done on time, and could easily get forgotten. The program allows you to create a simple Alarm within seconds, but still not much more is needed to create a more complicated Alarm, which will, for instance, remind you each Monday and Thursday afternoon to e-mail the work report to your project manager, by displaying a reminder and creating an empty message addressed to the person. It can also be set to some important date but not have any Action assigned - it will just remind you about something when you look at the list of Alarms. |
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