How to Explore, Adjust, and Save Priority Settings
Last time I introduced the concept of process prioritization. You can boost the performance of a process that needs to run faster, and you can also slow down the speed of a task that is interfering with your foreground work, without actually killing it. It’s time for a little deeper dive into what’s possible. First, I should probably mention the caveat that it’s probably smart not to modify the priority of a process too much. If you overboost a user app, for example, you might starve system processes and the net effect could be an actual slowdown of the system’s performance. So, start cautiously. If there’s a running process that you think would benefit from a kick in the pants, upgrade its priority by one level, and see if that gets you where you need to be. When you modify the priority of a process in Task Manager, the change is temporary, but you can get around this a couple of different ways. One way is to invoke the program using the START command instead of by directly invoking the .EXE file. The START command includes switches to specify the desired priority (/LOW, /NORMAL, etc.). So, for example, you could modify the shortcut on the Start menu that runs your program by invoking the command-line processor (CMD) with the START command. There are also a number of third party tools that claim to offer this capability, and you may want to explore them: Prio, the Process Priority Saver, and “Process Lasso.” A tool called Remote Process Explorer claims to provide a convenient way for viewing and tweaking processes on remote systems. I have also found the Microsoft/Sysinternals tool Process Explorer to be useful; it will help you see which files and directories a given process has open.
