I was trying to get this internet explorer process launched so that it can use only 4 processors on a 8 core machine. It wasnt as easy as I thought initially.

Finally I figured out an easy way and I am sure it will save a lot of time for others who require to do this.

There are few different methods we can do this.

1. 1st Method
1. System wide we can set the boot.ini setting to use /numproc=4 so that the machine uses only 4 cores irrespecitve of the number of cores available (provided the available cores is more than 4)
2. 2nd Method
1. Launch a command window and run the highligted commands from the next steps
2. Run cd c:\program files (x86)\internet explorer 
3. Run start /affinity F iexplore.exe
4. Now you can check the affinity from the task manager OR process explorer.

If you are using start /affinity, you will need to specify the value for affinity which is a hexadecimal value. Here is a simple way of calculating this affinity value.

Here is how the processors will be numbered. This may be different based on the number of nodes. However the calculation remains the same. Please use terms cores/processors interchangeably.

Based on the above formula, you can run the following command. Replace h with the value in the Affinity column. This will result in using all the CPU’s listed above the specified value including the current.

Example:

If you specify a value of 1F  for affinity, it will use CPU4, CPU3, CPU2, CPU2 and CPU0

If you want to use specific CPU’s, you will need to SUM the associated values and use the corresponding HEX value.

Example:

If you want to run a process on CPU0 & CPU4, you can sum the values

Start /affinity h iexplore.exe

Enjoy launching processes with CPU affinity :)