WinTasks 4 Professional is just what you need to manage your system resources. This $47.00 utility, designed for IT professionals and software developers, includes detailed real-time CPU usage graphs, system presets, and a built-in scripting language. 

With WinTasks 4, you can perform a number of system maintenance tasks to improve overall performance. You can remove unnecessary processes to help free up memory and reduce the CPU load; you can locate undesirable background processes, such as Trojans and viruses, and kill them; and you can use the WinTasks4 log to help eliminate problems such as resource leaks. In addition to these other nifty features, WinTasks 4 can change process Priority.

I was recently running an MPEG encoder to encode a rather long file. This particular encoder offered no way to change its priority, so we used to WinTasks 4 to increase the priority and thereby finished the encoding job in record time. We have also decreased the priority of some of our programs that appeared to take more than necessary.

Using the built-in scripting language, you can write your own scripts to start or stop programs. For example, I generated a script to stop the mail server when the client shut down. You can also create scripts to prevent a process from running. Aside from being surprisingly powerful, the scripts are amazingly easy to generate.

WinTasks 4 Professional offers more features and benefits than I could possibly describe here. Go to the LIUtilities site (http://www.liutilities.com) and read all about it, and maybe even try it out for yourself.