If you’re sick of seeing your CPU grind away at 100%, howling fans, laggy browsing and overall unresponsiveness thanks to HKO, then this might be good news for you:

This nifty little program is called BES. You can get it here: http://mion.faireal.net/BES/

What it basically does is limit how much CPU usage a single program can grab. As you can see in the screenshot above, I set HKO to 50%. It still runs fine now, but by how much you can limit it depends on your hardware of course.

Using the program is very straightforward. Extract the .zip file and run the BES.exe. Click the Target button and pick HKO.exe from the list. Click Limit this. If you want to catch HKO every time you run BES, click Limit/Watch instead.

After selecting HKO.exe you can use the options under Control… to adjust the CPU usage. (If you doubleclick anywhere on the background you can load your own image.)

That’s all. Enjoy your freed CPU cycles!

/Update: Since we’re still rolling back like a drunk donkey, I went and put some more stuff in. The layout’s changed a bit and there’s a close button now. The timer resets when ’1′ is pressed, so if you know how to send keys to applications it can work as intended.

Link to file: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FKMS9MG5 

 ————————————————————–

After getting rolled back three times yesterday I went off to do something worthwhile(?) and learned how to write basic AIR applications. Well, to be precise, I made a somewhat, if barely, useful pet feeding timer to avoid having to check the status in the pet window:

(image removed)

Basically it counts the 134 seconds it takes to fill an empty hunger bar. When the bar is full, the bone turns green, meaning you can feed the pet. After feeding you click the bone and the timer resets. Of course, you need to synchronize it to the feeding timer manually first.

There are also two modes. The first mode stops the bar whenever it’s full and waits for a manual reset. The second restarts the bar automatically after 1.5 seconds. You can toggle between them with the left button (circle). The button next to the circle is for keeping the timer on top of all windows.

You can drag the timer around with the progress bar. Rightclick the taskbar icon to close.

You might also need to install the AIR runtime first: http://get.adobe.com/air/

I’ll polish the display up a bit later.. maybe.