Assign priorities to applications

All recent Microsoft operating systems have contained the concept of priority, meaning in this case, which process gets the most attention from the CPU. In Vista, you can customize these priority settings so that your hardware is concentrating most on what you want it to.

Vista has a range of available settings ranging from 'low' to 'real time'. It should be noted here that any full screen application (including games) is automatically given high priority by Vista, so there are no frames per second increases to be had here. What you can do is tweak your commonly used windowed apps to get the desired level of performance vs. system resource consumption.

To assign custom priorities to applications:
Start the desired application.

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL and choose the 'task manager' option.

In the 'applications' tab, locate the desired program and right click on it. Choose 'go to process'.


This will bring you to the 'processes' tab, with the process that drives your application highlighted. Right click on it and choose 'set priority'. The priority list will open. Choose your desired level, but note that choosing 'realtime' is not a good idea if you want to run anything else at the same time.

Note that all settings will be reset to default when you restart the computer.