Windows 98 - The rumor about CPU priority resolved

Many Windows tips sites or professional PC magazines pay more attention to quantity than to the quality or even functionality of their articles. For example, there has been a rumor going around for 6 years that Windows 95/98/ME can increase the computing power of the Processors more to individual applications and less to Windows if required. This is the concept of processor (CPU) priority.

I'm not sure why this tuning rumor persisted for so long, because it simply doesn't work. Allocating the entire power of the processor to applications would result in major instabilities and crashes, which has little to do with speed optimization. But to be on the safe side, I actually applied the value in the Windows registry once and came to the following test result:

- The applications do not start any faster and do not perform their work any more quickly than before.

- Even special test programs did not result in a noticeable increase in performance.

The articles that try to take credit for this trick usually state that it works on 99% of all computers. I bet you are one of the 1% of users for whom this does not work!

But so that you can see for yourself, I have included the exact description of the trick.

Control processor priority - this is how it works:

1. In the Start menu, click on Execute and type in the command line regedit in. After confirming with Enter the Windows Registry Editor.

2. Navigate through the keys as described in the Windows Tweaks Lexicon article HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Services\VXD\BIOS. Now right-click in the right-hand pane and select New > DWORD Value. You now christen this with the name CPUPriority.

3. Now double-click on the value you have knitted yourself and give it a 1 (maximum setting...).

4. After a restart, you will experience the biggest and most significant increase in performance in the history of your computer, because from now on all processor resources will be allocated to your programs. You will not recognize your computer after this change, because the speed at which programs are processed has at least doubled.

If it doesn't work, I ask you to stand up and whistle the melody of a well-known mystery series with the X and wonder who can start such a rumor.

NOTE FOR NEW PUBLICATION: This article was produced by Sandro Villinger and comes from the Windows Tweaks archive, which has been built up since the late 1990s.