The Linear Canvas

For a number of years I have had a program called End It All 2. What this utility does is identify processes running in the background on your computer that may be unnecessary and stops them. The reason you would want to stop them is in many cases they are just running for no reason and using up system resources that could be devoted to the application that you are using. In my case I use a multitrack recording and editing program called Sonar 7. Recording and processing audio on a computer uses a lot of system resources and having a little extra power certainly doesn’t hurt any.

Another application for End It All 2 is computer gaming. While there can be many moving objects on the screen at once while gaming, there is even more happening in computer memory and processing. The more spare RAM and CPU cycles you have can make a difference in the quality of the gaming experience. Even video playback and creation can benefit from the additional resources gained by stopping unneeded processes.

As I recall, End It All 2 was originally written around the time that Windows XP was created. I have used it on Windows 2000 and XP. It will work on Windows 98 and Windows ME as well. I recently tested End It All 2 on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate and it seems to work OK on it too.

The only processes you should be careful about stopping or killing with this utility usually are the ones you need for Windows itself and the applications that you want to use. (i.e. don’t close the sound card application if you are recording music). Windows applications like explorer.exe are best left alone. There may be other processes that can cause your computer to become unstable if you close them. End It All 2 does provide some warning in cases that closing a program may render your computer temporarily unusable. In any case a simple reboot should clear the issue if you have one. If that happens just remember not to close or kill that process again.

Using End It All 2 only, I reduced my CPU usage by 10% and memory usage by 6% when using Sonar. End It All 2 automatically closed 16 of 24 processes. I also killed five processes manually to get that much resource usage reduction. You can kill programs automatically, but be careful. I had to disable my anti-virus manually because End It All 2 couldn’t do it. I believe that has always been the case even in previous Windows versions. Turning off your anti-virus and firewall software will result in a slight increase in performance. Just don’t open any unknown programs or access the Internet until you restart them.

Gaining additional resources, at least initially, is an experimental process. You can use Windows Task Manager to stop processes without using End It All 2. It just takes longer. Many times you’ll find that processes are easy to identify by their names or locations. Other times they are not so easily identified. Searching the Internet using the name of the process will usually give you an idea whether or not it’s possible to close or kill a process safely. Once you get past the experimenting, End It All 2 allows you save your settings, so that you don’t have to do it twice. I would suggest writing it all down on paper as well.

End It All 2 can also be run from a command line. That also makes it capable of being initiated from a batch file.

I have never hurt anything on any computer using these methods, besides having to reboot when I closed or killed something I shouldn’t have. I have only gained processing power and additional memory resources which is never a bad thing at all, I promise.