To change the performance of foreground and background programs

1. Open System in Control Panel.
2. On the Advanced tab, click Performance Options.
3. Under Application response, do one of the following:
• Click Applications to assign more processor resources to the foreground program than the background program
• Click Background services to assign equal amounts of processor resources to all programs.

 Note

• To open a Control Panel item, click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click the appropriate icon.
• Choosing the Applications option will result in a smoother, faster response time for your foreground program. If you want a background task, such as a Backup utility, to run faster, choose the Background services option.
• The Applications option allocates short, variable time slices, or quanta, to running programs, while the Background services option assigns long, fixed quanta.

Change the performance of foreground and background programs

Change the size of the virtual memory paging file

Change the maximum size of the computer's registry