@jetcitywoman said:Back on topic....  :-P  I once worked with a system manager who wasn't quite up to speed on how the process priorities worked on our computer.  (It was VMS, which prioritizes things from 0 (high) to 16 (low).)  Typical user processes run at 3.  The computers we had were old and rather bogged down, and when the financial people complained, she tried to be helpful by setting their processes "higher" to 5.   When I explained the priorities, she got a funny look on her face (and then went to fix them).  Heh.  (Let's ignore for now, the fact that modifying process priorities usually gains you nothing.  It was still funny.)Hopefully your memory is fading, because the lowest priority is indeed 0, not 16.  Typical interactive processes run at 4, batch processes often run at 3.  Setting a job to 5 to keep it ahead of other interactive processes in a CPU-limited situation is a typical strategy.