Nothing drives a person more nuts then a frozen computer. This goes for technicians, administrators, typical end users, and everyone else in between. You've been working for hours, when suddenly your computer completely locks up, and you are relegated to either rebooting your entire machine or simply killing all programs presently running. It typically happens for no rhyme or reason, but more often then not, is caused by multiple applications overloading your PC to the point where it can't take it anymore.

While rebooting is usually the most effective solution, it's typically not the most practical. Fortunately, amongst many of their great products, Resplendence Software has come up with an amazing solution to your 'frozen' problems, called AntiFreeze.

AntiFreeze is a self proclaimed 'Emergency Task Manager' that is capable is suspending all applications presently running, and killing them if necessary. This is how it works.

While AntiFreeze is sitting in your system tray, eating up very little resources, it's awaiting the hotkey combination of 'ALT+CTRL+WIN+HOME'. Once this sequence of keys is pressed, the task manager like AntiFreeze is launched and a majority of running applications go into a 'suspended' mode. Where as it doesn't kill any particular app, but it places it into an anti virus like quarantine and allows you view any programs that may be the culprit.

As opposed to the Windows Task Manager which doesn't suspend applications, it forces you to kill applications one by one. The suspension feature of AntiFreeze is what makes it unique. It essentially 'kills' any item that may be the problem child, without actually killing it at all. In the screenshot below, you can see that you also have the option of resuming programs, which you know aren't causing the issue.

The only time that such a great application as AntiFreeze won't come in handy, is when your mouse itself has become unresponsive and your system is quite literally LOCKED UP. This typically points to a hardware issue, whether it be a driver or overheating. Other then that, AntiFreeze is a perfect solution for software based lockups, which can be quite frequent on Windows based machines.

This can be especially handy on a Windows based server, a server where a reboot cannot be accomplished during production hours. AntiFreeze is compatible with 32 and 64 bit XP, Vista and Server 2003 operating systems.

For the amount of resources that it eats up, and its completely simple ease of use, you can't go wrong with AntiFreeze. It does everything as advertised. I have yet to discover any bugs or problems thus far, but please let us know of any you already know or discover.

Have you any similar alternatives to AntiFreeze?