giving high CPU priority to certain programs

Are there any disadvantages to giving some commonly used programs high CPU priority via task manager?

XP home & 2 gig ram btw

I suppose if its a program that uses alot of cycles it could be detrimental to overall system performance, but otherwise, if thats what you want, I don't see how it could be a problem.

Nick

All setting priority really does for you is it makes sure that when that application requests time slices from the scheduler, it gets them, as long as the processes its competing against are running, and are of a lower priority.

The problem can happen, if the program you set to a higher priority, requests alot of time slices (or more technically, does not put itself to sleep), then your system may lock up because the OS wont get any time to do its things (process mouse movement, keyboard input, network traffic, hdd access), and your system can grind to a halt.

The only time i mess with higher priorities is running benchmarks, to make 'sure' that they get as many time slices as possible, and to complete faster.

Cluster has it right.

As an addendum, Vista has some new scheduling improvements so that even the highest priority tasks still have a cap on thread scheduling, so that even if they're badly programmed (ie don't 'share' as they should) they still can't usurp the entire system. So system instability due to forced thread priority is less of an issue on Vista than XP.

Further, I'll go further and say that, typically, as long as all your running apps are well behaved to begin with, changing priority has little impact in terms of making sure a high-CPU hog is able to get more CPU. Now, if you're running multiple CPU hogs simultaneously, it might be worth changing priority so your "favorite" one can get more.

I have firefox and explorer on high CPU priority...so far no problems. Firefox doesn't need it so i think im gonna change it back to normal.

Thanks for your replies