WinTasks Professional 5.0, as its name suggests, is not for the novice. It's designed to help you prevent software programs running in the background slowing down your PC's performance, or even harbouring Trojans and spyware.

You are initially presented with a window displaying all the processes running on your PC - how important they are, how much CPU power and memory they take up, their priority, and when they launched. You can click on any process for more detail, but really esoteric programs don't have descriptions, which means you can't tell what they do and if it is important.

However, there are some useful features to help you put a stop to pointless processes. You can click on the Autostart button to find out what starts on bootup and stop anything that you don't really need. You can also block processes by criteria - for example any that use over 70 per cent of the memory - and halt access to certain Web sites.

This software is far too complex to be of much use to the average user. If you are fairly "techie" though, you could find some of the features help free-up your PC's resources.

Price: $72.35 (download version posted to you) Distributor: AH Computer Services Phone: (03) 5272 3023 URL: www.ahcs.com.au