How to give 100 percent CPU usage to a process

Question

(windows 8.1 machine with i3) Is it possible to put a process using 100% of my CPU?

I have a rather "slow poke" CPU and after a while working with an application, it gets really slow.

I'm wondering if it is possible to give that application the ability to use all of the processing power in order to make it faster.

I already set the priority to realtime on task manager and the affinity is for all 4 processors...

Does this depend on who programmed the app?

Solution

Long story short, no.

In order for Windows to even function, there are a number of services and processes that are constantly running. In order to dedicate 100% of your CPU to one process, you would essentially need to not have an operating system, in which case the process likely could not run anyway.

By default, applications will use as much CPU usage that they can get, unless they give you an option to throttle the usage.

Comments

[LawrenceC]

Memory leaks can cause similar behavior. Unfortunately, this is up to the application developer to fix. You may look for an updated version of your application.

[Daniel B]

And, to add to this: Setting the affinity is only for restricting. Setting priority does absolutely nothing, unless there's multiple processes competing for resources.