Windows XP / Beginners

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Using WinTasks to profile your priorities

Another great utility, made by LIUtilities, is called WinTasks Pro. This utility is like the Windows Task Manager, but on steroids. It offers tons of new features that the Windows Task Manager does not have, such as the ability to see individual CPU and memory graphs for each application, scripting capabilities that allow the user to set up triggers based on CPU and memory activity for each application, and most importantly, the ability to have preset profiles for application priority levels. Also, on top of these features, it has built-in information about quite a few commonly known processes to help users figure out each process that is listed because they are often not easily identified by the process name.

The ability to have a profile for your open application priority levels enables you to automatically change the priority of several applications at the click of one button.

WinTasks 4 professional can be downloaded from www.liutilities.com/support/ downloads/. Download a copy now and install it if you would like to follow along with these steps, which will guide you through creating a profile of your priorities:

1. Start WinTasks by clicking the Start button, expanding All Programs, and selecting Start WinTasks from the WinTasks folder.
2. When WinTasks is loaded, you will see a list of all of the different processes running on your computer.You can adjust the priority at which each process is running by right-clicking the process and then selecting either Increase or Decrease Priority. Go ahead and change the priorities of all of the applications that you have running to what you would like them to be.
3. When you are satisfied with all of your priority changes and are ready to create a profile of them, click the little key icons in the Presets toolbar.
4. Type in a name to save the state of all of the priorities, as in the Save Preset window, and press OK.
5. Next to the key icon that you pressed, you will notice the name showing up in the button to the right of it. Every time you press this button, it will reset all of the priorities to what you changed them to for this preset.
6. Repeat the previous steps, changing the priority levels for each application to a different value, and then click a different key icon to save the new preset again.

Now that you have multiple presets of application priority levels, you can easily switch between them by clicking the buttons.

The capability to create separate presets of priority levels for different applications allows you to optimize certain programs, depending on what you are doing. For example, you can create a profile for your processes when you want to play a game.To do that, you could decrease the priority of many of the system processes and applications running in the background so that a game running at normal or higher priority will have more CPU time.

Lower the priorities of all of the other background applications, such as your instant messaging programs and other programs that run in the background. This will allow your game to run faster, because these other background applications will have a lower priority.