If you're tired of having Windows applications eat up all of your system resources and lock up or crash your computer it might be time to get a new computer, or at least some more RAM. But if you don't fancy spending the cash, you might want to check out Process Lasso, a free tool to help you keep runaway programs under control.

Process Lasso does a couple of things. It can sit in your system tray and do nothing at all until an application meets certain conditions, like eating up more than 35% of your CPU cycles. Then Process Lasso goes and lowers that proces's priority. But you can also set it to do a bunch of other things including:

• Limit applications so that they only use one CPU on multi-core systems
• Set an application to run at a certain priority every time they run
• Configure the programs that launch on startup
• Kill currently running processes
• Log all executed processes

You can achieve some of the same results with Process Tamer, an application we looked at a couple of years ago. But Process Lasso is far more customizable than Process Tamer.

[via Lifehacker]