Setting priorities on Windows' apps?
 

Is it always better to set the priority of either your editing program or any program that you want to solely dedicate all your processing power to realtime or high priority for faster/better results?

If you haven't messed with any of the scheduler settings, Windows will give the most priority to the active application, e.g. if you're in the editor editing, it's getting a little boost from Windows already. Messing with priority level yourself usually doesn't get you anything, and putting normal applications in "real-time" priority is a great way to crash your machine.

I don't think the real-time setting crashes your machine. At least, it doesn't the few times I've tried it.

With Vegas, you'll render slightly faster with Vegas on real-time but the difference is so slight (2%?) it's not worth doing unless it's like a final render.

It's worth shutting off other programs that steal CPU cycles, like distibuted computing apps.

The only tweak I find worth doing with Vegas is overclocking. Performance will increase almost linearly with processor clock speed.

With rendering, good old fashioned cpu horsepower is king. XP is a pretty darn good OS from a multitasking and process management standpoint, and while I wouldn't generally recommend doing real-time adjustments to process priority, it may offer some mild performance gains. Nothing to write home about, as Glenn mentioned.

What makes a pretty big difference is stopping any unnecessary applications, especially those that auto-start when you boot up, and then when you're ready for that final render, do a full system restart first. And, of course, regular maintenance of your drive and your OS through utilities such as Norton's Speed Disk and Win Doctor will help much as well.

And as a rule, stay away from ever installing non-essential programs on your production system. Leave the testing and playing for your play system - or better yet, someone else's system ;) .

As I've said before David, stick with the basics. Real-time *can*
be dangerous for your Windows. Yes, I've seen it crash on that.
If you by any chance get to hang Vegas or one of the components
it loads (like the mpeg or windows media encoders) and it's
in real-time your only way out is usually the powerplug so to
speak.

Priority settings is usually done to lower an application that is
using too much cycles.

Stick with the default settings, they work fine.

Imran, to be honest... I've tweaked and cleaned the hell out of my system to ensure its up to its par performance. I'm pretty sure my system will be fine -- but just had to make sure. :P