ADVERTISEMENTS

Now days, most of the computers come with multi-core processors. And if you have multi-core processors (dual / quad core, etc) you can assign core affinity to a running program by opening the task manager. Core Affinity Resident is a portable utility for Windows 7 and Vista that allows you assign core affinity to all running applications with a few clicks, without using the Windows ‘Task Manager’.

With Core Affinity Resident, you can easily set Windows processes to use different processors in order to make a program run faster or to isolate a particular program that uses a lot of processing power, and save your preferences.

Once you download and run this utility, an icon will be placed in system tray area. Clicking on the Core Affinity Resident system tray icon will bring list of running applications. Once your target application is selected, its core affinity will be shown. Now proceed to check or uncheck the desired cores and then push ‘Save’. Now your software will use only the cores you want to, and will remember your preferences in the future.

Note that setting processor affinity is only useful for programs that actually support hyper-threading. If you try this on a non hyper-threading process, it won’t make any difference and could actually slow your computer down. If you have an older application running on a dual core machine, you can set the program uses only a single core to prevent it from eating up 100% of the CPU.

Download Core Affinity Resident