Thursday, December 25, 2008

Monitoring and optimising applications on dual-core, quad-core, and multiple-processor systems

Windows XP and Windows Vista set running processes to run on all of the available processors by default. In Windows XP and Windows Vista, which both support dual-core, quad-core, and multiple-processor systems, you can set which of the processors runs a particular program or application. This is known as setting the processor affinity. However, note well that you should not use any third-party utility to set the processor affinity for operating system files, because doing so could cause system instability, system crashes, and data or system loss.
Here is how you set the processor affinity for Windows Explorer:
Press the Ctrl + Alt + Del key combination to bring up the Windows Task Manager. Open the Processes tab with the mouse pointer. Windows Explorer is explorer.exe. Right-click on explorer.exe under Processes, and choose Set Affinity. This brings up the Processor Affinity window, which has boxes for 32 processors (CPU0 to CPU31). In a dual-core system, which uses two processors, the two processors are called CPU0 and CPU1. They are both enabled by default, which is the best setting for Windows Explorer, but, because explorer.exe is a Windows program, not a system file, you could choose to have just one of the processors running it by removing one of the enabling check marks to disable that processor from running it. You can assign a processor to run any of the processes (programs and applications) listed under Processes.

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