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Start applications on specific CPU and priority

Posted February 2007 by Steve Sinchak

There is a great little utility that has been around for ages in Windows called the start command. This dos command allows you to start any process with advanced settings.  In Windows Vista it is perfect if you want to start an application and tell windows to only run it on one CPU and at a high priority level.  For example, let's say that you want to start Microsoft Paint and have it run on your second CPU core at Above Normal priority. The command below will accomplish this:

start /affinity 2 /abovenormal mspaint.exe

You can customize the command above and replace the 2 with the processor number (in hex) that you want the processor to run on. You can also adjust the priority level by using one of the flags below:

  • /Low
  • /Normal
  • /High
  • /Realtime
  • /Abovenormal
  • /Belownormal

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