Will changing GW to "high Priority" in Task Manager have ANY effect?

I dont know much about this and I'm a little afraid to do it..

When I check in my Task manager's process list, GW.exe is running at LOW priority...

I was wondering if I was to set it to High or at least something higher than its current setting- if that would have an impact on my gameplay in terms of FPS, smoothness or anything at all...

Also- I occasionally have GW minimized (like right now) or window'd while I check forums and wiki...

If I set it higher, will that cause problems for anything like browsing sites?

I think I'll test this right now. brb! =3

First off, here are my system specs and relevant info to testing:

Graphics Card: 64mb ATI (unsure of exact card)
Ram: 512mb
DSL internet over Wireless signal
Average FPS before testing: 7-10 in town, 15-20 outside
Average Ping: 100
Gameplay graphics setting: Medium level, Post Processing off
Gameplay audio setting: default

After setting priority to High, my FPS in town went to 10-13 average and 20-30 outside, and the gameplay was somewhat more stable and less lag spikes whenever entering combat. I was in Lion's Arch though when testing in town so the decorations and snow may have broken the back on my poor laptop.

Also I got a warning that changing priority would result in system instability, so that may be important as well. Hope this info is relevant to your interests.

/me waits for Jeff to come back on his mom's laptop to say his pc blew up :P

Ive tried it, no noticeable difference. At least, i didnt see it.

Funny story Xenex, I was afraid my laptop would blow up and I would have to log onto my mom's PC.

The only time it will effect you is when you've got other stuff actively running. This means actually running and doing stuff, not sitting there idle. For example if you start trying to covert some CDs to mp3s in the background Windows will dole out the CPU as it sees fit-giving little time to low priority apps so it can serve the more important high priority apps. When there is a battle like this then raising the priority will help your game get all the CPU at the expense of the other applications you're trying to run.

Since normally you don't have a bunch of applications trying to use the CPU so it doesn't matter if you're low or high, either way nothing is asking for the CPU so you'll get 100% of it.

Tip: Do not switch to Realtime. It froze my comp on the spot.

lol I think gw automatically goes to low priority when you minimize it or its not the active window. That kinnda explains why i can do so much multitasking on a single core pc

No divine, it is automatically low when starting up. You have to manually set it to High upon startup.

It changes back to low after a few moments. Don't bother messing with it.

Wrong.

Correct.

Guild Wars is automatically on 'Normal', you can not change the priority of the game, and when you load the Task Manager, GW is count as minimised, or not the 'focused window', so when you switch from GW to something else, it is automatically set to 'Low' to allow you to be multi-task more easily, even on single-core processors.