Change Task Manager Priorities

What is Change Task Manager Priorities?

How to adjust priorities with Task Manager

Computers these days are able to perform multiple tasks at the same time, but even so the applications still have to “fight” over the available time slot on the CPU. There are a few ways to determine which application gets a priority over the other. In Windows 7 each application has a priority level which determines the time slot. By default your applications will be set to normal priority level, but you can change it and as a result it affects how fast the program runs.

You can change the priority of your applications with Windows Task Manager. However, you should note that if you set an application to Realtime, it might hog all the CPU time and it will be basically impossible to terminate the problem. Therefore, you should be careful while settings applications to this type of high priority.

Application that might need a lot of CPU time might be a game or a graphics program for rendering a video clip. In order to adjust the priority, do the following:

• Click the Start menu button and enter “taskmgr” into the Search box. Hit Enter and the Task Manager will load.
• Select the Processes tab. Choose “Show processes from all users” in order to see all the processes that run on your computer.
• Now you have to find the process you want to modify. Once you have located it, right-click the process and choose “Set Priority”. You will have to select a level of priority from the list. Once you are done, the modification is complete.

Note – if you have multiple cores that supports hyperthreading, you will be presented with yet another option in the list of priorities called “Set Affinity”. With that you can specify the exact CPU core you want to run the application.

Also, don’t forget that the moment the application is closed the newly set priority level disappears and the next time you open the program, it will be back to “normal” again.

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