Any way to *force* programs to stick to specified priority level?

[Curley_Boy 0]

I have been playing a number of CPU intensive games recently (eg Doom III, HL2) and have been running a number of other apps including winamp in the background. The system has no problem with multi-tasking between all of them, but I sometimes have to specify a manual process priority level for certain applications to keep everything smooth.

 

Winamp causes a number of difficulties. My tracks will play smoothly (except a slight hitch when switching away from something like HL2 to the desktop) as long as I set the plugin decoder priorities to highest. But to stop this from interfearing with frames rates in HL, I have to set the winamp.exe process to "below normal" priority. Unfortunately at the beginning of each subsequent track winamp will raise or lower the priority level to whatever is specified in it's settings (which doesn't support anything finer than low, normal, high or realtime).

 

I had considered running winamp under a separate and restricted user profile (with "runas" service), but in that case I wouldn't be able to set priority levels in the first instance.

 

Does anyone have any ideas on getting winamp to stick with the priority level I give it?

[BabyBoy-- 0]

hmm first of all how much ram do you have?

second what's your soundcard?

 

those two piece of hardware can cause such issues when multitasking, (in this case audio wise)

 

as if the sound card is not good enough it will not buffer enough information therefore the time it takes to swap theres no data sended to the sound card

 

which is where ram comes in as it wont take much time to swap

 

basically priority wont do much of a difference here considering its a game environnement vs windows task

 

 

[Curley_Boy 0]

I have 512Mb of ram, and my sound card is the Creative PCI 128 (old I know).

 

Nevertheless with a bit of tweaking here and there I can run HL2 and a sigificant number of background programs without difficulty (only a slight 1/2 second skip in audio when switching from HL2 to the desktop and back again with winamp running). As mentioned in my first post I seem to have found the optimum priority settings for my plugins and the main winamp.exe, to keep this stutter to a minimum. But like you said the problem is more hardware based. Winamp offers the ability to buffer sound data through its directsound output plugin, I could experiment with that I suppose, but ultimately a better sound card might be in the offering for christmas.

[Curley_Boy 0]

I've managed to do it by creating a restricted account and running winamp.exe through the "runas" service, then lowering the priority via process explorer.

 

If APK's tool will make the job simpler I will take a look (have various 9x cd's knocking about round here)