Project Mercury: Make Your CPU Care About the Foreground App Again
Windows is pretty good at juggling tasks — until it isn’t. You fire up a heavy app, and the system’s still prioritizing 20 background things you don’t need right now. That’s where Project Mercury steps in: a tiny utility that quietly boosts the performance of the program you’re actually using, by adjusting process priority and CPU affinity on the fly.
No bloated control panel. No reboot. No learning curve. It just listens, sees what’s focused, and gives it the CPU attention it deserves.
What It Actually Does
| Feature | What It Means in Practice |
| Foreground boost | Increases process priority when a window gains focus |
| CPU affinity management | Keeps background processes off performance-critical cores |
| Configurable exclusions | Prevents Mercury from touching specific apps or processes |
| No tray clutter | Runs in the background — no GUI unless you open it |
| Portable build | No install needed — works straight from a folder or USB drive |
| Compatible with games/apps | Works well with latency-sensitive workloads (e.g., OBS, DAWs) |
Why It’s Actually Useful
– You’re gaming or recording and background tasks keep spiking CPU
– You work in VMs or emulators and want them to run smoother when focused
– You run compute-heavy tools that need CPU prioritization, but only sometimes
– You don’t want to tweak task manager every time — you want it automatic
– You’re on a midrange CPU and want to stretch every core intelligently
System Requirements & Compatibility
| Component | Notes |
| OS | Windows 7 / 10 / 11 |
| Admin rights | Required for affinity changes (optional for basic priority) |
| Install method | Optional — works in portable or installed mode |
| CPU requirements | Works with multi-core CPUs; benefits more with 4+ cores |
| RAM usage | Minimal — typically under 20MB |
How to Use It (You Barely Have To)
- Download the latest version
Grab it from the official GitHub page or trusted mirror.2. Launch Mercury
It starts running in the background immediately — no config needed.3. Focus any window
When you click into a program, Mercury quietly boosts its priority.4. Let it manage in the background
It lowers priority when you switch away, giving resources to what matters now.5. Adjust rules if needed
Use the config file to exclude apps, tweak behavior, or lock affinities.
Where It Works Well — And Where It Doesn’t Belong
What it’s good at:
– Improving responsiveness in apps that are CPU-sensitive
– Making older systems feel snappier when multitasking
– Helping game streamers and creative workers keep latency under control
– Being invisible — set it once, forget it
What it won’t fix:
– GPU-bound bottlenecks or memory issues
– Multi-user environments (it’s not per-session aware)
– Background services that need consistent priority
– Deep system tuning — this isn’t Process Lasso or a kernel mod
Final Thought
Project Mercury is a minimalist fix for a real-world annoyance: Windows not knowing what you actually care about right now. It doesn’t try to be everything. It just makes your active app faster — and that’s usually enough.
If you’ve ever opened Task Manager and thought, “Why is this thing still running at Normal while I’m trying to work?” — Mercury was built for that moment.
