I'm curious of your opinion, gents. I have the intel core i5 760 processor with four cores. Obviously the game, being old as it is, uses only one of the cores - apparently the same one as the OS (correct me if I'm wrong). I've seen some recommendations to introduce ProcessAffinityMask=2 in the conf.ini, so that the game and the OS use different cores. Not being very smart at computers, I thought I'd rather ask first before I mess up my PC. I'm particularly anxious about any possible long-term side effects, overheating or whatever.

Short answer would be: no side effects, but no noticeable benefits.

{HVY-E}Jinxx made a thread on the subject over at AAS, if you want to dig deeper and tackle this better:

Thank you JAMF, very informative thread.

Interesting thread. Back when I got a Core 2 I made sure to set the process affinity to prevent the game ping-ponging back and forth between processors (with a noticeable stutter). Now I have a Core i7 and the same setting seems to work well. With the Core i7 I use ProcessAffinityMask=7.