Often, there’s a single app on your computer that’s doing something processor intensive. While Windows is quite good at sharing processor time between multiple apps, a single busy app can slow down every other app on your PC.
A busy app can have other bad side effects, too. It can drastically reduce your mobile PC’s battery life. It can also increase the temperature of your PC, possibly causing your PC to slow the processor down, further reducing your PC’s performance.
Use Task Manager to find a busy app. Launch Task Manager, click More Details (if you need to), and then select the Processes tab. Click the CPU column heading to display the busiest apps at the top of the list. Task Manager shows you which app is using your processor time the heaviest.
You can stop the app by right-clicking and then clicking either End Task or Stop. Don’t be too hasty, though. First, you should stop the app by closing the window if you can; ending a task from Task Manager doesn’t allow the app to save its data. Second, the app might be doing something important. In the figure , the app is Windows Defender performing a scan for malware.
If you want to allow the app to continue running, you can minimize the impact it has on your PC’s performance by lowering its priority. On the Processes tab, right-click the app and then click Go To Details. This selects the app on the Details tab. Now, right-click the process name (which might be different from the name displayed on the Processes tab), select Set Priority, and click Below Normal or Low.
Windows uses priorities to determine which apps receive the most processor time when multiple apps need to use all the processing time available. If you have a single app using your processor time, changing the priority won’t impact that at all. However, if you have an app running in the background and it’s slowing down the app you’re using in the foreground, lowering the priority of the background app can make your foreground app seem faster.
If you want to prevent an app from using 100 percent of your processor time, even if it’s the only app running, you can adjust the processor affinity. Follow the series of steps described earlier to find the process on the Details tab. Then, right-click the process and select Set Affinity. Use the Processor Affinity dialog box to specify which processors the app is allowed to use. To limit an app to half your total processing time, select only half of your processors.
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