Many a times you may see a application using high amounts of memory or hogging most of the processing power of your CPU. At such times other applications may work extremely slow or completely stop working.

This is a extremely problematic situation since you are tied down till the application releases the memory or CPU usage for other tasks to perform. The best solution has always been hitting Ctrl + Alt + Del and killing the memory hogging application.

I was a follower of the Ctrl + Alt + Del method for quite long until I started using Process Explorer a great tool for knowing what’s going on your system and a must have task manager replacement. With process explorer you get to know in depth knowledge about each and every process.

Getting back to memory hogging applications, there are times when the application that is eating up all the memory and CPU resources may contain some important information that you may not have saved or may contain different browser tabs which may not have been book marked. In such cases you may lose important data by forcefully terminating the application.

Using Process Explorer you can easily free up the memory and CPU resources being used by any application so that other applications are allowed to perform their tasks. Once you have lesser applications running or are leaving the CPU idle for some time you can resume the application that was suspended and allow it to process.

To follow this simple trick you may need to do the following things

Download Process Explorer

Download Process Explorer first so that you can access the tasks that run on your computer and control them easily. Once you have downloaded it there is nothing to install simply double click on the procexp.exe file to launch the program.

Suspend Task Using Process Explorer

If you feel that some application is hogging to much memory or CPU resources (which you can also find out by looking at process explorer) you can easily suspend the process so that it does not use any further resources from the system.

To suspend a process right click on the process name you want to suspend and click on suspend.

Once you have done that the process will release all the memory and CPU usage so that other processes can easily process their tasks. Remember doing this does not kill the application it just suspends the tasks it was performing and ensures you do not lose your data.

Resume Task Using Process Explorer

Once you have finished all your tasks or are not using too many applications you can easily resume the process you had suspended earlier. To do that once again in Process Explorer right click on the task and click on the Resume option. (Note you will only see Resume option if you had suspended the task as shown in the earlier option)

Once you have resumed the task it will begin from where it left last time and ensure that no data will be lost.

Summarizing

Killing applications using Ctrl + Alt + Del has been one of the favorite modes to restore resources from applications that are hogging too much memory or CPU power, but that does not ensure data integrity all the time and may involve data loss for you. Trying the simple tips from above will atleast give you a better chance to save data you might have lost otherwise.

How many times in a day do you kill applications? What do you feel about this tip? Do let me know your opinions.