Set Processor Affinity in Windows 10



The modern multi-core processors are designed to work well with operating systems, so the operating system distributes their operations as evenly as possible across all the available cores. Processor Affinity was introduced in Windows 7 operating system. In Windows 7 or later versions, you can configure applications to use only one, or several cores of the processor, by using the Processor Affinity settings.


The easiest way to change the Processor Affinity is to use the Task Manager. To launch Task Manager, right-click on the taskbar, and then click Task Manager, or you can press Control + Shift + Escape key combination to open Task Manager. 


By default, you will be in Process tab, and you will see that applications processes are jumping around. You need to select an application, for which you want to configure Process Affinity. Then right-click on the application, and choose “Go to details”, or “Go to process”. Task Manager will than switch the tab from Processes to, Details. Right-click on the Process, and then click Set Affinity. After you select Process Affinity command, you will see Process Affinity dialog box, with all the cores that your processor has, and by default, “All Processors” is checked.


To explain you in brief, let’s see an example. I am going to run two processor intensive applications. The first application is Camtasia Studio, which is going to produce a video. The second application I am going to use is Disk Defragmenter. When Camtasia Studio will start rendering your project for creating a video, it is going to eat up all your processor, and ultimately slowing down your computer, and multitasking will be a pain for you at that time. So, I define separate cores for the both process. You can see the results using Resource Monitor from Task Manager. Open Resource Monitor and then click the CPU tab, where each CPU core is showing different usage measurement.


As my processor have only 2 cores, so whenever I render a project in Camtasia Studio, I always change Processor Affinity to a single core, so I may use my computer for other task at the same time. You can try experimenting with different applications of your choice.

Do remember that, restarting your computer will reset the Affinities to default for all the applications. If you found this trick useful, then don’t forget to hit like, share this video with your friends, and do leave a comment. Subscribe to our channel for more upcoming videos. Thanks for watching, and have a nice day!






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