Priority Change

Every program, or video game running on your computer can be analyzed in greater detail from the Task Manager. Here, you can view dependencies, and real time resource distribution. The system is mostly responsible for resource allocation, but you can also take matters into your own hands with applications like Priority Change.

The application comes in an incredibly lightweight package, which even skips you the effort of getting it installed on your PC. This gives you the liberty of carrying it around on a thumb drive, just in case you want to set priority for tasks running on every computer you use. No need to worry about registry entries, because they remain intact during use.

It’s probably a good idea to run the application with administrator privileges so it can properly tweak these kind of settings. If you want more comfort, a hotkey can be assigned to the shortcut from the Properties panel, or place a shortcut in the Startup folder to make it run with Windows, although it doesn’t have a minimize function and sticks on the desktop until closed.

There are only two fields which require your interaction, namely the window title, as well as the priority level, which is a drop-down menu with multiple entries. Unfortunately, you need to carefully write down the window title yourself, with no detection mechanism whatsoever. Priority levels are set to idle, normal, high, or real time.

Sadly, the application hasn’t received an update in quite a while now, and there’s a high chance it fails to properly set priority on modern Windows iterations. What’s more, Windows 8 introduced the possibility to adjust priority from the Task Manager, which renders the application rather obsolete for latest OS iterations.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Priority Change comes with good intentions, but a great deal of time, as well as a pretty poor set, and implementation of features keep it from properly doing its job. The lack of a window detection method makes selection rather difficult, and no prompt informs about the current priority of the chosen window.