How can I set my affinity automatically in a bat file or shortcut for steam to use only 2 cores

[rpgSPAZ]

I have an 8 core AMD processor, but there are a lot of games on steam that won't work with it unless I turn off the majority of the cpus in task manager. I'm running win8 and have to go into details in the task manager then right click steam.exe and then set affinity to core 0 and core 1, so far this is the only combination I've tried but it works, so I prefer to just use them than try other cpus for any reason. I've tried using the /affinity command in both a .bat file and also in a steam shortcut in the link text box but neither seems to work. It will launch steam but when I go to check the affinity all cpus are still turned on and if I play a game through steam like that, such as Assassin's Creed 2, it will freeze up my entire computer making me do a hard reset. Here's the line I use in the bat file and also the steam shortcut C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start "" /affinity 03 "D:\Steam\Steam.exe" I've also tried numerous variations of it but nothing works. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thank You in advance. All my games work great if I only use the 2 cpus since the games seem to take the cpu affinity from the steam client, I just want an automated way to set this option so I don't have to go into the task manager each time.

[ManiacMal]

Lesson learned? There's no point going beyond quad core, most games don't even use 4 cores yet, now you have to do all this manual work anytime you want to play a game. As far as I know you will not have any luck trying to change affinity on run time, its only after the application is running you can do that.

[rpgSPAZ]

I don't regret buying an 8 core processor I'm sure future gaming will support it, I was only curious if there was some way to shortcut going into the taskbar, I run steam all the time so I only have to go into the taskmanager once a day anyhow to set the affinity. On a side note, I was running the release preview and I just bought the upgrade to win 8 pro thinking maybe it would help but it didn't do any good. I was going to upgrade anyhow, so the extra $40 for win 8 isn't a big deal, however I lost 15 hours of game play on GTA IV because I forgot to backup my save game files, so I'm starting that over.

[Buck213]

This should help you set Steams affinity automatically to core 0 and 1.

Create a batch file with these contents in your steam directory

cmd.exe /C start /affinity 0x03 steam.exe

Then you can create a shortcut to your batch file where ever you want it.

or

Download PSExec[technet.microsoft.com] from Microsoft.
Extract pstools.zip to your steam directory
Create a batch file in your steam directory with the contents

psexec -d -a 01 steam.exe

Then you can create a shortcut to your batch file where ever you want it.