Sometimes you want to reduce the priority of a Windows service or process that is hogging the CPU. Or you want to boost the priority to make sure it gets the CPU it needs. That this is a bigger concern with the advent of SSDs -- disk access is no longer the bottleneck it once was, allowing CPU usage of processes to spike.

Changing the base priority of a process is easy (but proceed with caution as not all processes enjoy having their priorities changed.) 😠

Just create a VisualCron execute task with the following settings. For example, to lower the priority of the notepad.exe process:

Command: C:\Windows\System32\wbem\wmic
Arguments: process where name="notepad.exe" CALL setpriority "Below Normal"

To set it again to normal:

Command: C:\Windows\System32\wbem\wmic
Arguments: process where name="notepad.exe" CALL setpriority "Normal"

There are other values you can use. See SetPriority method of the Win32_Process class  for the full documentation on this command.

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