How to Set Windows Vista Processor Affinity

Video Transcript

"Did you know that Vista can actually use more than one processor? Hi I'm Dan Afonso of Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting and this is how to set Vista Processor Affinity. Processor Affinity is a fancy way of saying you can allocate which processors run for which application. Now you want to do this if you have an application that uses a lot of resources and you really don't want it running on all your processors taking up all their time or if you want to split up your processes across CPU's in a bit more of an organized fashion rather than letting Vista do it itself. It's not a very common thing but if you're burning a DVD, if you're making videos, if you're doing anything that requires a lot of processor time and still want your machine to be usable it's a really good thing to know. So what we're going to do is I am just going to bring up the task manager by right clicking on task bar, clicking on task manager. Now over here we are going to see a lot of programs under the processes tab, find the one you want. I'm just going to grab one of them and set the affinity. Now it's going to come up with what can I set it to? I can set it to CPU 0 or CPU 1. This is a 2 processor machine starting at 0 so I'm going to tell it now it can only run on CPU 1 so hit o'kay. Boom, that's it. Now you shouldn't need to do this very often. Really it is only going to happen if you are doing a lot of video editing, sound processing or anything that just requires a lot of processor time and it should be used with caution because it can wind up annoying or just otherwise making programs run kind of funny but used properly it will make your experience a little bit better and you know make Vista a little bit more tolerable. I'm Dan Afonso and that was how to set processor Affinity on Vista."