Sometimes you need much stricter and more precise control over the resources that certain processes demand. If your hardware is relatively modest, you can't let a problematic process claim 100 percent of its attention, or the whole system will suffer.
Earlier I talked about a Windows Update problem that appears when installing available updates for Windows 7. The svchost.exe process can demand 50 percent or even the 100 percent of a processor while trying to determine which hotfixes the system needs. The web offers dozens of solutions, but in my case the best was to wait, and almost three hours later all the patches appeared. The underlying issue is that svchost.exe is not the only one with this madness of devouring resources without explanation. We have seen the same behavior in antivirus and web browsers, limiting the user's options. Windows Task Manager allows priority and/or affinity changes to a process, but it does not enable the possibility of implementing a "hard barrier" in terms of percentage.
Although there are advanced administration tools like Process Lasso, what we have here today is much simpler. The software is called Battle Encoder Shirase, and its job is to limit the maximum CPU percentage for a cap of three processes at the same time. The program is very easy to use: it all starts with a click on the 'Target' button, where we locate the process to limit. Once selected, we click the 'Control' button, and it is there that we finally adjust the percentage. By design, each new process is reduced by 33 percent, but you can set an extreme limit like 99 percent if necessary.
The last stable build of Battle Encoder Shirase is a year and a half old, but it works perfectly on all versions of Windows, including 64-bit editions. On a personal note, I can say it works quite well, since the difference in processor access was noticeable in Firefox, particularly when scrolling.
Battle Encoder Shirase positions itself as a special solution for very specific cases, but if you frequently have to deal with an erratic process, you now know how to put a limit on it.
