Have you ever had a program freeze that refused to close or disappeared? One annoying problem is when a poorly written application crashes and refuses to shut down. Or maybe you’ve noticed that your computer is suddenly running very slow, but there’s no obvious sign of why? In that case, you may have a process running on your system that is consuming all of your CPU time or taking up a lot of memory.
Well, Windows Task Manager can help you in some of these cases to identify the cause and remove the problem application. First of all, the task manager’s purpose is to provide computer performance information along with details about currently running programs, processes, and services. It also provides the ability to monitor your network traffic if you are connected to a network.
Open Task Manager
So let’s start learning about this very useful tool in Windows 10. You can access the Task Manager in several ways:
1. Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC while holding down each key. Like you would Ctrl + Alt + Deletewhich I think most people have done so far.
2. Another way is to press the second key combination mentioned above, Ctrl + Alt + Deleteand then click Task Manger link.
3. Press Windows Key + X or right click on the Start button and you will get a power menu with a link to the task manager.
Overiew Task Manager
You should now see the Task Manager dialog box on your desktop. By default, in Windows 10, you’ll see the reduced version, which only gives you a list of running apps.
To close an unresponsive program, simply click on it and click End of quest button. Since most people will really only use the task manager for this purpose, Microsoft has decided to hide all the additional details unless someone really wants to see it.
Since we want to see more than just the apps running on our computer, click More details. This will bring up the task manager with all the tabs.
Process, Details & Services Tab
By default, Procedure tab will be displayed. The list of processes is divided into three main categories: Application, Background Process and Windows processes. The application will give you a list of all the programs currently running on your PC. These are the ones that show up on your taskbar or in the system tray.
Background processes are all Windows Store apps and third-party apps running on the system. Some of the processes here you may see are running in the system tray. Most of the other processes are background processes that will stay idle until you open the program or when a scheduled task runs.
The Windows processes section includes all the core processes required for Windows 10 to run properly. It mainly consists of many Service Server processes (svchost.exe). I wrote before about how svchost.exe can sometimes cause high CPU usage, but to solve the problem you must know which Windows service is running inside that particular svchost.exe process.
You can use this tab to get detailed resource usage information for each process running on the system. It’s a quick way to diagnose a slow computer if a process is taking up 95% of your CPU, for example. Or if a program is driving your disk usage up to 100%, you’ll be able to watch it here.
The Processes tab is also good for restart Explorer. All you have to do is right click Windows Explorer and choose Restart. In previous versions of Windows, you had to kill the process and then run a new explorer.exe task, which was a pain.
When you right-click on a process, you get a list of actions you can take on that process.
You can end the task, create a dump file, go to details, open the file location, search online, or view properties. The end task will continue and terminate the process. Generate dump file only used by developers and you will never need to worry about that. Go to details will take you to Details where you can see the process ID.
Under Description headings, you’ll get more information about the company or program associated with that process. Another good option is Search online link. If you are not sure what the process does or where it comes from, click Search online and it will do a search for that EXE file along with a description. Open file location very useful if you want to know the location of the EXE file on your computer.
Finally, while on the Details tab, if you right click on a process, you will also see an option to go to the services tab. Note that you can set the priority and affinity for the process here. You should really never change these values for any process unless you know what you’re doing.
If the process has a service associated with it, it will take you to the Services tab and highlight that particular service. However, not all processes have services associated with them.
Here you can right click to start or stop a service and you can also open the Services panel from here. This screen will show you all the services on the system and tell you which are running and which have stopped.
Hopefully that has given you an overview of the Task Manager in Windows 10 and what it can be used for. In Part II, we’ll talk about the Performance and App History tabs. Interesting!
