Conclusions
Many top-of-the-line enterprise applications have built-in controls that allow for application and process customization. Older applications and those marketed to consumers and small to medium-sized businesses often don’t allow you to control process priorities or which CPUs will be utilized. Today, however, it’s not uncommon to see consumers and small business running dual-core systems. To get the most out of this processing power, you can use the built-in start command in Windows operating systems to control the base priority of processes spawned by applications. To limit applications to run on only the first processor in your system, you can use the RunFirst application. If you want to target specific processors on which your applications can run, use ImageCFG. Using these methods will allow you to optimize applications on multiprocessor computers, even if those applications were developed without such systems in mind.