I was curious, so I just tried it. And I think I got exactly the opposite of what was intended. Installed it, saw the little splash screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+Win+Home... Antifreeze.exe crashes... and continently, everything else is nice and, well, frozen. The site says it supports Vista 32, but perhaps I've got something running that it doesn't play nicely with. Too bad I'll never no what.

nitz

Sysinternals (recently bought out by Microsoft) has had these capabilities for years. As well as some very useful command line components. There's a whole suite of stuff they do, very useful, under the hood of windows sorts of things

palantyri

Hmmm, couldn't this be somewhat negative? Personally, it seams to me as if this tool would promote an inefficient and rather CRUDE way of combating PC lag. Although temporarily deleting certain processes could allow a computer to speed it, it doesn't fix the problem at the core. More important than simply pausing a freeze is to actually keep a well maintained PC through registry, temporary, and startup files cleaning.

For instance, CCleaner [feedelite.com] is an excellent tool used to not just reduce freezes, but also to keep a PC will maintenanced. Fleeting methods such as this AntiFreeze is great when needed, but is not the long term solution.

chensamurai

Is the only difference between this and task manager that you can suspend the processes? Normally if I have a program that's hanging I'll get task manager up and kill it...usually fixes the rest of the computer at the same time.

Foiler

Oh my goodness WOW thank you so much, Adam! This type of program should be built into the OS!

Dooga

My XP Home machine freezes as well when I hit the hotkey. I think my antispyware or antivirus or firewall or something have something to do with it.

lm

I agree if the PC hangs due to a frozen app, the best tools are from sysinternals.

In addition I have in background Process Tamer from [www.donationcoder.com] in cases when the PC hangs due to a task taking all the CPU.

Fabrizio Lodi from Italy

It doesn't appear to be freeware. the dreaded 'Download Trail Version' link is on the site.

bigfoot780

I can't wait we don't have similar problems on mac... but on a mac the solution already comes built in. Sad to hear that's not the case for my fellow pc enthusiasts.

Enjoy.

timhalberg

I concur with the others here:
- the standard Task Manager build into Windows does exactly the same: hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and you can kill a process;
- if you want to have more options/control there is only one way to go: Sysinternal Process explorer, which is also completely free and now owned and so supported by Microsoft itself.

xahmol

Actually, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc to go straight to the task manager in Windows. Saves me keystrokes, so I like it.

Kafka

Yes Tim, that BSD kernel really gets the job done ;)

I recommend Process Explorer from SysInternals myself; I use it as a task manager replacement. That, and or pskill command line utility (also from SysInternals), if you have a command shell open and still responsive.

I'll have a look at the ProcessTamer, Fabrizio, thanks for the tip!

Laur

@xahmol:
I 2nd Process Explorer. you can suspend process there as well.

hometoast

I recently installed Star Wars Battlefront and for seemingly no reason that game will freeze the computer making it impossible to do anything but restart, so I might give this a try and see what happens.

Jesse Mrozowski

Does it work well when the problem lies into a full screen Direct3D application?

JrezIN

I'm surprised Lifehacker picked this up, or at least doesn't include a stronger caveat. Samer of FreewareGenius admitted that he couldn't fully test it (he waited 2 days for something to hog his CPU) and invited people to try it and comment. The only 2 comments on his review that evaluate the program say that it crashed when they hit the hotkey. It looks like nitz & lm, above, had the same experience. Looks like it's free during the alpha release to me.

Also, for those commenters who say the standard Task Manager does the same thing: RTFA. AntiFreeze freezes nonessential processes so that you can actually use its task manager capabilities. It's supposed to be for times when even the Task Manager takes minutes to start and is hardly usable.

joelena

quick tip for frozen mac app's that i find to work sometimes

right click or command click the dock icon and leave it for a while, quite often the app will spring back to life

Gonzie

By far, best of all of the process management tools that I've found is What's Running. It manages Windows Processes, Modules (DLLs), Services, Drivers, IP Connections and Startup files. The UI is extremely clear and it's a great learning tool and invaluable for spotting malware that might be running. One of the best Windows utilities ever, IMO.

You can get at it at: [www.whatsrunning.net.]

It's 100% free for personal use.

kensonic

From the product's website: "But very often the system is so busy that even the task manager will not help you."

I don't know what programs they are running on their PCs but 'very often' sounds a bit exaggerated to me.

Also, having another process taking up my system's resources just for the rare occasion of a system freeze seems not quite worth it.

thelm

Yup, same as the others - installed this and within minutes I was unplugging the laptop and ripping the battery out. Uninstalled it straightaway.

Chutney

I have the same problem. I'm running xp x64 (which is supported), but the second I hit the ctrl alt win home, my computer freezes.... I think I'll stick to Sysinternals.

battletrax

I'm sure this is a great tool, but the only problem is that I can't get the keyboard shortcut to work.

I'm using an IBM Thinkpad, and they don't have a Windows key. I've looked in the "Access IBM" folder, but theres no key mapping tool. The built in shortcut for the Windows key is CTRL+ESC, making it impossible to hit Windows and CTRL at the same time.

Any suggestions?

runaway-man

I installed it on my machine... and figured even though it wasn't frozen I'd hit the key command to see what it looks like when running and all that jazz. I hit it, the system beeped. It came up and I looked it over then hit END. The system went back to my desktop and then blue screened. I can only attribute the blue screen to this program since this is the first time in the 6 months this machine has been built that it has done this. Point is, it didn't work for me. If it worked for someone else, then shibby (also reads as "awesome" or "great"). Thats just my experience with this program. (p.s. I love the idea, but did uninstall the program after hitting the reset button.)

mjrkiljoy

I have had many occasions where my system was so busy that the task manager was completely unresponsive.

I have installed it on my dual-core pentium xp pro sp2 system and it seems to be running fine. I hit the hotkey combination and got the antifreeze interface. Trillian crashed when I closed the antifreeze interface.

I wish that I could hide the systray icon.

Rant93

Doesn't install on W2K. Useless in that case, since it's my 2000 installations that freeze if someone sneezes, and at random. I'm not talking about some fake freezr that the task manager will deal with, but a kill-switch, reboot-required, keyboard disabling, mouse-hanging sort of freeze. If Sys'ternals helps with that, I'll be the first thing I've seen from Microsoft that does what it's supposed to do.

e-tat

Oh man it's Norton CrashGuard redux! Do not want.

UnStatusTheQuo

I would have to agree with runaway-man, my laptop does not have a dedicated Home key so I can't hit the correct keys to activeate either. Can that be customized?

badmagic

Check out Process Tamer. I use it on all my PCs. It works great, hasn't caused any problems, and is less aggressive than AntiFreeze.

Find it at:

[www.donationcoder.com]

RandyN

@timhalberg: Wow, Macs never ever freeze up? But wait, Macs also have still an excellent tool to fix those freezes that don't happen? How... illogical.

It's posters like you who are the reason why Mac fans don't get the respect they should.

Mysterius

I'm partial to Process Lasso -- it's similar to Process Tamer, but with a few more features...

My favorite feature -- the ability to set an auto-terminate list (great for killing programs that you can't uninstall on a corporate machine!)

It also manages out-of-control treads. I haven't had my XP system freeze up in months (I partly attribute that to this program)

ahpatel

I have way too many programs running in the background as it is...adding another one that i almost never use is just going to add to the lag-- and the instability of the computer.
I'd rather use DTaskManager by Dimio. its free, has even more features and you can override the windows task manager shortcut keys (so you can ditch Task Manager completely)

yetsune

Man, I wish I'd read these comments BEFORE installing this POS. Same as everybody else, I installed it, hit the hotkeys, and BAM, down goes the program, then the rest of the system is frozen. Nice app.

Kudos to you guys for always trying to find programs like this, but I'd advocate maybe a tiny bit more testing before you recommend it. Or maybe go back and put a caveat in the original post now ...

Ian

I'm agreeing with everyone here. I've got a newer XP SP2 Machine (XPS M1330) and it crashed it and completely brought it to its knees. Nice idea for an app but just lousy in reliability.

Process Explorer is a really nice app to learn where all of the CPU is going. I don't think it has this suspend feature, but it does allow for a lot of control on a thread level.

Scott Vieth

I installed it and it immediately froze my system when I hit the hotkeys. The only thing that would work was Windows Tab. I was forced to reset my PC.

Mr_Morrison

If, like me, you installed it for kicks and giggles and then found the need to uninstall it, do yourself a favor and try hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del real quick. For me it said something to the effect of the administrator has stripped you of your right to use or see task manager and kicked you out into the middle of the town square naked for the masses to ridicule.

I googled this and found a link to a M$ knowledge base article. If you need it, here it is:
[support.microsoft.com]

If fixed it for me. And to the people talking about macs, I get my fair share of use with macs at work (and enjoy it immensely). This is just my gaming rig/school pc (getting my BS in Computer Science).

mjrkiljoy

Am I really the first person to make the obvious "Windows Only" crack? OK, here it is... The program is Windows only, because only Windows would need it. *Another apple fanboy and I hi-five, miss*

glass