Demanding applications can drag your whole system down. You can limit their impact by assigning selected CPUs and cores for those specific apps.
1. Opening the Task Manager with admin rights
2. Finding the Task of a running App
3. Setting Task Affinity: Selecting the CPU and CPU cores for an app
4. Setting Task Priority: Defining how dedicated system resources get distributed to running Apps
Task Affinity
Modern PCs usually have four, eight or even more CPU cores. Windows has no option to optimize the assignment of CPU cores to applications automatically. Apps usually get access to all CPU cores and to the maximum available system resources. Only when the limits of your systems are reached, Windows will divide in a quite dumb way all resources to all running app.
Just a few apps take benefit of the mutlicore-design in a way that users can select how much system resources to give them. Some antivirus-suites do it for instance for the scanning process.
Task Priority
Windows can prioritise Apps running on the same CPU. Task priority can be understood how much CPU attention is given to each task. This means more or less how many calculating cycles will pass until the next request of this app will be addressed.
Luckily you can manage used CPU-cores and also task-priority yourself with the help of the task manager.
1. Opening the Task Manager with admin rights
Just before starting anything, you should know that you have to log-in as an Administrator in your Windows 10 account.
You can open the Windows Task Manager in different ways. Here are two methods for systems with and without keyboard.
- Type task manager in the task bar search and click on the result.
- Press the hotkey-combination Ctrl + Shift + Escape
Per default the Windows 10 Task Manager opens up in a limited view. Click on More details.
2. Finding the Tasks of running Apps
In the detailed view of the Windows 10 Task Manager, right-click on the application that you want to addressand click on Go to details.
This opens the process-list and highlights the related process for the app you are interested in.
3. Setting Task Affinity: Selecting the CPU and CPU cores for an app
Right click on the process you want to select the CPU cores for and click on Set affinity.
Here in Processor affinity, you can set one or more CPU-cores for your desire app. Please note that CPU cores are listed as CPUs on most systems.
Check or uncheck any of those CPUs. Once you are finished, click on OK and close the Task Manager.
4. Setting Task Priority: Defining how dedicated system resources get distributed to running Apps
Right click on the process you which priority you want to change and click on Set priority.
Here you can raise or lower the priority given to that process from Normal. Above normal and below normal usually do not change a lot and you might want to try high or low.
However, be careful when applying the Realtime setting which might freeze your system in some scenarios.
