Process Lasso
Donation-ware utility will lower the priority of applications that are hoarding the CPU. Plus it boosts the priority of the current application slightly. It does a great job of making WinXP feel smoother and avoiding complete lockups. I was actually trying really hard to find a Windows port of renice, but this works just as well, if not better. Although, it does use a couple megs of memory.
Process Lasso: http://www.bitsum.com/ProSuper.asp
Start Command
Built in start command is useful for setting start up priority and processor affinity.
- Low priority: %comspec% /c start /low notepad.exe
- Processor affinity. Win7+. Careful, it's a hex mask thing, core 2 is NOT "2":
-- use only core 0 - start /affinity 1 iexplore.exe
-- use cores 0 and 1 - C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 3 dfrgui.exe
-- use core 2 - C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 4 dfrgui.exe
Tags: software, tool, throttle, process, thread, 100%, limit, W2K, NT, locked, lock