In Windows 7, applications would run on all the cores of your processor by default. With dual or quad core processors, you can actually set a particular program to run on only one of the cores so that other programs can use the remaining cores. This is called a processor affinity, in which programs or applications are made related or attracted to a certain core of a processor. Doing this actually makes your computer performance much better when they run certain applications, allowing you to get the best of the multiple cores. This article teaches you how to set processor affinity on Windows 7.
How to set processor affinity is not difficult, and is almost similar to the recent Windows. First, you will need to access into the Task Manager. This can be one by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, and then clicking “Start Task Manager”; or you can just click Ctrl+Shift+Esc which will lead you directly to it. Then, click the “Applications” tab where you will be able to see the applications that are currently running. From the list, right click on the application in which you want to have the affinity adjusted, and then choose “Show processes from all users”. You will then see the processes, and then click “Set Affinity”. After that, choose which CPU you want to allow the process to execute on, and then pressing “OK” would have you set its affinity.
Basically, to choose which application to run on specific cores depends on how much resources it takes. If a certain application takes up too much resource, set about the different applications, especially if you are likely to run them at the same time, to the different cores. This way, one core will not need to do so much work at a time to get an application up and running. As a tip, you could put a less resource demanding one on one of the cores, while the high resource demanding one on the other.
Other things you should know is that while setting affinities do help make system performance run much smoothly, it is not exactly the wisest thing to change the affinity settings for System Processes since they function best where they are. Applications that are alright to change affinities are the third-party applications, which are applications like your video and sound editing programs, 3D graphics programs, and so on so forth. Do also note that the affinity settings will only stay the way it is when it is opened; it will go back to its default settings once you close them. Thus, you will need to reset the settings each time you use a particular program.
All in all, choose your affinity settings wisely and you will enjoy a boost in your processor’s performance.
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