This productivity hack is not for you, it’s for your trusty sidekick (or despised evil foe if you use OS X or Linux), Windows! Have you ever tried a process-heavy app, only to see that it slows down your whole system (some Photoshop reference is in order here…)?

You may be able to get rid of this problem by setting priorities in your task manager. Call it up using “ctr+shift+esc” (this is the way intended, not ctr+alt+del, in Vista this doesn’t bring up the task manager anyway) and find the process hog. Right click on it and then on “set priority”. I would recommend setting it to high, not real time, since this may inhibit you from using anything else. If all goes well this may speed up your experience significantly.

Please be aware that this may not always work. In Vista I could see it VERY noticeably while playing poker online (heavy 3d graphics), but on XP I couldn’t see such a visible productivity enhancement. Also, this is a good example because I rarely want to exit my poker game, so a slow down of other programs was not a problem.