Playing with proccess priority in WinXP

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Komataguri

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In the Task Manager.

On the Proccesses Tab.


You can rightclick to set the proccess priority on a given proccess.


With everything being run on Normal, Things get kinda laggy in Winamp video when webbrowsing and loading programs.

Setting Winamp to a higher priority ["AboveNormal"] fixes this.... but is there any risk of seriously screwing up something bad?


Specially since I'm considering running my games at a higher priority so background gunk dosn't hog CPU time from the game?


I'm just worried about making something totally fubared, so I wanna check and make sure if this is safe to screw around with.


And if it is safe, is there anyway I could force certain programs to run their proccesses at a higher priority upon launch? CnC:Generals:Zero Hour does NOT like to be tabbed out so I can play with its priority settings, for instance.
 
there is no danger in upping the priority a little bit. It's realtime that you need to worry about. the one time I set the priority to realtime, it completly froze (duh :p)
 
Bugalaman said:
there is no danger in upping the priority a little bit. It's realtime that you need to worry about. the one time I set the priority to realtime, it completly froze (duh :p)
Click to expand...


Common sense has prevented me from setting a proccess higher then AboveNormal ;) :D
 
Yeah, I tried putting F@H at realtime once, just to see... bad things.
 
Since its not a bad thing..


on to the second half of my first post..


Any way I can force the program to load with the higher proccess priority?

Cause it resets back to normal every time I close out and rerun the program later.
 
There is no harm in setting it to "above normal" that just give it higher priority than other normal programs. High is even OK IIRC, just not real time, as others note. :D

Edit: Yes you can start a program with higher priority, from the command line run "start /?" and check out your options.
 
Phoenix86 said:
There is no harm in setting it to "above normal" that just give it higher priority than other normal programs. High is even OK IIRC, just not real time, as others note. :D

Edit: Yes you can start a program with higher priority, from the command line run "start /?" and check out your options.
Click to expand...


Eh, I don't start the program from the command line...its a game..


Does that mean I'd juse add the [HIGH] Command to the end of "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe" ?

so it'd be "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe" [/HIGH]

?
 
I honestly don't see a reason to up the priority of a game. Just closing the programs that are a CPU hog will do the same thing. Above/High priority won't make your game run faster if your CPU is already maxed (which it probably already is).

Plus if you just close the few background programs, you'll free up some RAM too.

But maybe it's easier for you to just change the priority... whatever works :)
 
IIRC whichever the active window/program is automatically is set to HIGH... for example you are watching a windowed media player clip of high quality and you decide to unrar something huge. When you click and make the winrar window active you video will get choppy... click the media player window and winrar will drop in priority back to NORMAL and media player goes back to HIGH.

above and below normal are there so you can bump individual programs higher or lower than the "noise" in the backround and aren't used by the OS unless you specify it and were new in Win2k

i think that is how it goes at least... it has been a REALLY long time since I took that class. ;)
 
i run some video encoding stuff at realtime, when i dont plan to use the comp
 
Komataguri said:
Eh, I don't start the program from the command line...its a game..


Does that mean I'd juse add the [HIGH] Command to the end of "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe" ?

so it'd be "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe" [/HIGH]

?
Click to expand...
LOL, yes you do. ;)

Right click the shortcut, go to properties. What do you see? A command prompt run line, that's how all shortcuts run. What I'm telling you to do, is go to the command prompt run the "start /?" so you can bulid the line.

The command will open like "start /high "path\filename.exe""

So edit what you see in the start line of the shortcut's properties and add "start /high" so it reads:

start /high "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe"
 
Phoenix86 said:
LOL, yes you do. ;)

Right click the shortcut, go to properties. What do you see? A command prompt run line, that's how all shortcuts run. What I'm telling you to do, is go to the command prompt run the "start /?" so you can bulid the line.

The command will open like "start /high "path\filename.exe""

So edit what you see in the start line of the shortcut's properties and add "start /high" so it reads:

start /high "D:\Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\generals.exe"
Click to expand...

Sometimes even the bleeding obvious can escape the best of us :-\


thanks man ^_^;;


EDIT

" The name 'start' specified in the Target box is not valid. Make sure the path and file name are correct "

when I try to add the start /high to it like you say.
 
You would create a batch file to perform this function. So practice the batch file on the command line

That should resolve the issue
 
Odd, start doesn't like full pathing, it needs to be run from the directory the exe is in. So, yeah it'll have to be a batch file.

basically create a batch file with these commands.

d:
cd Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour
start /high generals.exe

Then point the shortcut to the batch file.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Odd, start doesn't like full pathing, it needs to be run from the directory the exe is in. So, yeah it'll have to be a batch file.

basically create a batch file with these commands.

d:
cd Programs\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour
start /high generals.exe

Then point the shortcut to the batch file.
Click to expand...

I figured that much out already ^_^;


Mucho appriciatado my for the pointing in the right direction
 
Instead of /high, you can set it to /abovenormal.

I tried this with UT2004 and it was unplayable. The keyboard input lagged behind the game.
 
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