Process Cleaner

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on March 02, 2012

Gamers don't like to share. They love multiplayer environments, to be sure, but when it comes to their systems' resources, they're selfish; anything that saps gaming power has to go, at least for the session. Process Cleaner is a simple tool that can terminate all non-Windows processes with a click. It also manages Services and the Start menu, cleans your hard disks and browser, and optimizes ActiveX.

Process Cleaner collects all these tools in one simple, plain interface, which is not a bad thing. And since Process Cleaner basically unifies existing functions, everything worked well enough. Before we ran the process cleaner, we opened the process viewer. This tool segregates Windows processes, which can't be terminated, from those that can be terminated. There were check boxes that let us exclude programs from cleaning.

Next we clicked Initialize Service Setup, which is very much like the process tool, excluding Microsoft services from termination. The hard disk, browser, and ActiveX cleaners operate similarly, with check boxes for selecting or deselecting features for cleaning or termination, as applicable.

After excluding our antivirus software and making other choices, we clicked the Process Clean button. Process Cleaner notified us it was about to terminate all non-Windows processes. While it didn't make a huge performance difference in our test system, it did free up resources for gaming or other power-hungry applications, and nothing crashed. On older, slower PCs, Process Cleaner could make a much bigger difference. The Recover Process System tool let us restore any process we'd terminated, or all of them.

The Guide to Process Optimization button opened Web-based documentation explaining how the program's features work. It duplicates the interface layout so it's easy to find what you need, and screenshots help get the point across. The only thing that bothered us about Process Cleaner was the occasionally clunky labeling and documentation, at least in the English language version. But Process Cleaner is easy to use, effective, and quite useful for temporary performance boosts or regular housekeeping.