A hard to tame application like googleupdate.exe could cause a notification every other second or so which could be really annoying as there is no obvious way to disable the notifications in the review copy.

SPKiller is a similar application that can block processes and services in the Windows operating system. The installation itself requires more work than the usual double-click on a setup file. The installation will simply place the files of the program in a directory on the computer’s hard drive. The user has to click on InstallService.bat to install the Windows Service. After that the Service needs to be started in the Windows Services Overview.

The Windows Process and Services blocker is configured with a simply XML file that is located in the program’s installation directory. The configuration is not more complicated than editing a text document. It is made up of three sections that are of importance to the user. The first is called CycleTime and defines the interval in milliseconds that the running services and processes are checked. ServiceNames contains a list of Windows Services that should be blocked if running while ProcessNames does the same for Windows processes.

The configuration file contains a few example services and processes mainly from McAfee but also Radia in the ServiceNames configuration and annoying processes like GoogleToolbarNotifier or AppleMobileDeviceService in the ProcessNames listing.

SPKiller works well as a process blocker in Windows especially since it blocks both processes and services on the computer system.

Update: SPKiller is no longer available. The developer website and product have been discontinued.

Monitored Windows processes get killed at the moment after they are started instead of being blocked outright so that even a start is not possible anymore. A few small scripts can slip through at the moment because of this behavior as it takes some time to recognize a newly launched application and send the kill command to the computer system.

Process Blocker uses a simple text file that is placed in the same installation directory as the main application. This text file contains names of executables that are not allowed to be launched on a computer system. The program itself is added as a Windows Service to the system which has to be restarted after making changes to the text file.

Process Blocker will display a user notification in the Windows System Tray whenever a process has been blocked by the service. A similar application that provides a better user experience is the process manager Process Lasso. The developers of Process Blocker on the other hand are not even halfway through their roadmap. The next step will move the management of processes from the text file to a Group Policy administrative template. Other planned features are killing processes and applications using its crc (in case they get renamed) or full path, recording process errors and information in Windows Event log, allowing users to only run applications from specified folders (e.g. program files and Windows) and changing process killing to process execution prevention.

Process Lasso can probably be described as a application that manages processes. This is however not a task manager replacement but a software that can be configured to automatically react in certain situations.

Those situations include processes that slow down the system by using way more cpu cycles to bring other applications and the system to a standstill or processes that are run in a higher priority when detected.

So, to keep it short. Process Lasso can be either run as a service in Windows or as a background task consuming only a low amount of resources handling processes that either use to much cpu cycles or those that you want to prioritize.

It can also stop any process that you select automatically from that time on. Another useful feature is that it logs all processes that are running on the system making it easy to identify any processes that could be harmful.

Read More:

Process Lasso Homepage