Actual Reality

If you have a single-core CPU, you might have noticed that certain programs will hog the whole processor and won’t let you do anything else. Everything starts to bog down until you can’t do anything but wait for the one program to finish.

Or, you might have a computer that overheats whenever you do something CPU-intensive, like video or audio encoding.

So how do you deal with these nuisances? There’s two ways to do it.

The first is to set the priority of the program’s main process to a lower value. Unfortunately, I’ve never had much success doing this because most programs ignore the priority and end up sucking up all the CPU anyway. If you really want to try it, check out this post for some info. (It talks about speeding up, but it applies exactly the same to slowing a process down).

The second (and better) way is to use a program that limits the program’s CPU usage. One program that I find very handy is Battle Encoder Shirase, or BES. It allows you to selectively limit a process’ CPU usage. Once you’ve downloaded it, start it up and choose the Target… button. This brings up a list of processes that are currently running. Choose the one that is eating up the CPU and click Limit this. Then hit Yes to start limiting it. Most things are self-explanatory, and the website has good instructions on how to set it up, so I won’t go into any further details.

Of course, you can use these same techniques with a dual- or quad- or whatever-core system too. I just find them a little less necessary.