D2OL Daddy

D2OL Daddy

by Jeff Gilchrist

D2OL Daddy is a Graphical User Interface that sits in your Windows tray and monitors the D2OL and TSC clients to make sure their processes are running at the lowest possibly priority. This should greatly reduce and in many cases entirely eliminate the choppy/slow response from other software while D2OL/TSC is running on your machine. It will even monitor and control multiple copes of D2OL/TSC running on the same machine.

This program works with the D2OL and TSC clients available at:
D2OL: http://www.d2ol.com/
TSC: http://www.childhooddiseases.org/download.html

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Screen Shot

D2OL Daddy v1.0 Screen Shot

License/Disclaimer

This software is freeware and can be freely distributed. Use at your own risk. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to your equipment. Please keep this README file with the D2OL Daddy executable if you are going to re-distribute it.

Download

Click to download the latest version:

Windows Binary: D2OL Daddy v1.0 (473 KB)

Recent History

v0.9 (Sept. 4, 2004)

Initial Beta Release.

v1.0 (Sep 10, 2004)

Now starts minimized in tray by default unless it is the first time D2OL Daddy is run.

Now also changes priority of D2OL.exe process to lowest as well as GridWin.exe and DockWin.exe

Contributions
Ken Hines (aka Silicon)
- Making the cool d2D icon for D2OL Daddy.

Usage

Extract the ZIP file to a directory on your machine. Run the file D2OLdaddy.exe which will start the program and look like the screenshot above. Set the "Auto Behave" timer to how often (in seconds) you would like D2OL Daddy to find the D2OL/TSC processes GridWin.exe and DockWin.exe set their priority to the lowest possible in Windows. Click on the minimize button and it will sit in your Windows tray, monitoring D2OL/TSC and making sure that it behaves.

If D2OL or TSC is actively running, D2OL Daddy will display "D2OL is Running... <Behave!>". If its not running, it will say NOT running. A list of process IDs from D2OL/TSC that were found is also displayed. This is just for informational purposes but you don't need to do anything with it.

The "Behave Now" button will instanly find the processes and set their priority to the lowest. Since the Auto Behave feature will automatically do this ever specified # of seconds, this button will only be useful if your auto timer is set to something large.

Why do you need D2OL Daddy? The D2OL/TSC client spawns new GridWin.exe and DockWin.exe processes every few minutes after work has been completed. In Windows, there are two priority settings for programs, one is process priority and the second is thread priority. The developers set the process priority of those two processes to IDLE but forgot to change the thread priority so it defaults to NORMAL. D2OL Daddy will find those processes and set their thread priorities to the lowest possible making D2OL/TSC behave more nicely on your machine.

Bugs/Contact

If you would like to report any bugs or contact me related to the software you can reach me via e-mail at:

v0.9 (Sept. 4, 2004)	Initial Beta Release.
v1.0 (Sep 10, 2004)	Now starts minimized in tray by default unless it is the first time D2OL Daddy is run. Now also changes priority of D2OL.exe process to lowest as well as GridWin.exe and DockWin.exe