Here’s how to lower priority of a resource consuming service in Windows 8:
1. Press ‘Windows’ + ‘R’ and type in ‘services.msc’. In the window that opens, scroll to the name of the service for which you want to lower the priority and double click the service name. Make a note of the executable name in the service properties.
2. Right click ‘My Computer’ and select ‘Manage’. Go to ‘System Tools>Task Scheduler>Task Scheduler Library’. Click on ‘Create Task…’.
3. On the ‘General’ tab, give a meaningful name to the task, select if you want the task to run only when the user is logged in or not, and make sure that the task is ‘Hidden’ option is checked and ‘Configure for:’ is set to ‘Windows 8’.
4. Now, go to ‘Actions’ tab. Click ‘New…’.
5. Select ‘Action:’ as ‘Start a program’. In the ‘Program/script:’ box, copy paste the following –
“C:\Windows\System32\wbem\WMIC.exe” process where name=”<Process name noted in step 1>” call setpriority 16384
In our case, we needed to lower the priority of Windows defender process, hence the above line looked like –
“C:\Windows\System32\wbem\WMIC.exe” process where name=”MsMpEng.exe” call setpriority 16384
Click ‘OK’ when done.
6. Click ‘Yes’ to confirm.
7. Now, click on ‘Condition’ tab, and uncheck the option ‘Start the task only if the computer is on AC power’.
8. Click on ‘Triggers’ tab. Click ‘New…’ and select a desired schedule for the task. Also, make sure that you select the settings for when the task should be repeated and when the task should be stopped (just in case it gets stuck for some unforeseen reasons). Also, ensure that the ‘Enabled’ box is checked. Click ‘OK’ when done.
9. Now click ‘OK’ to close the task properties.
10. That’s it. You have successfully created a task to lower the priority of a resource consuming service in Windows 8. This in turn will lower the resource consumption of the service by lowering the CPU cycles allocated to the service process’.
You can use the above trick in other versions of Windows too. You can use the following table to determine numbers for changing priority levels: