Prioritize Tasks With Task Manager

When you run your PC, several processes run in the background at all times. Before Windows XP, no other version of Windows gave you the independence to decide how to run one particular process. But Windows XP gives you the option to do so. All you have to do is to fire up the Task Manager and you are the boss of your PC. Well, theoretically, of course. A wrong decision made here can make your system highly unstable, or even cause it to crash. But hey, it's no fun to always shy away from experiments, right?

Besides, the Task Manager can also be useful when you want to prevent a process from hogging up system resources. Often you will find that a particular process is hogging up system resources, while the other essential processes are starving. The best solution in this case is to kill the unstable process, in order to restore harmony to your PC.

Here's how you can prioritize and distribute CPU resources among the processes running in your PC. Make sure not to change the priorities of system processes, however. Doing so can cause great instability in Windows, or even make it crash. Here's how you can prioritize processes:

1.     Right click on Taskbar, and from the menu that pops up, select Task Manager.
2.     In the Task Manager window, click on the tab named Applications.
3.     Select the process you want to prioritize. Right click on the process and from the pop up menu, select the option "Go to Process".
4.     You will be instantly taken to the Processes tab, with the process already selected in the window.
5.     Right click on the process name (which is already selected) and from the menu that pops up, select Set Priority.
6.     Choose an option among Below Normal and Low.
7.     You will receive a warning saying that doing this can cause instability in your system.
8.     Click OK anyway.
9.     You should notice an immediate change in the way your system is behaving.

Note that the process is easily reversible by rebooting the PC. So, if you think what you did resulted in messing up the system, simply reboot the PC there and then, and the default affinity of the process will be restored. Also, don't ever change the affinity of any system process. Doing so can harm your operating system beyond the thought of recovery. It is better to leave these processes alone at all times.

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