Here's how to pause and resume any process to get back this wasted CPU time, without having to quit and relaunch (and close open windows, etc.). You might even eek out a few more minutes of battery life.
On the command line, first get the PID of the process you want to pause; we'll use Explorer as an example:
% ps -axww | grep ExplorThe PID is the number in the first column, or 2001 in this case. To pause a process, send the STOP signal to its PID:
2001 ?? S 7:55.67 /Applications/Internet Explorer.app...etc
% kill -STOP 2001The process will become unresponsive until you send it the CONT (continue) signal:
% kill -CONT 2001This is a much nicer way to recover some spare CPU cycles without continually quitting and restarting applications.

