Have you ever gotten a hang of a program that refuses to close or disappear? One annoying problem is when a poorly written application crashes and refuses to shut down. Or maybe you noticed that your computer suddenly became very slow, but there is no clear indication why? In this case, a process may be running on your system that takes up all the CPU time or a lot of memory.
Well, Windows Task Manager can help you with some of these situations to determine the cause and close the problematic application. First, the purpose of the Task Manager is to provide information about the performance of your computer, as well as information about the programs, processes and services currently running. It also gives you the ability to monitor network traffic if you are online.
Open the task manager
So let’s start by exploring this very useful tool in Windows 10. You can access the Task Manager in several ways:
1. Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC while holding each key down. Just like you would do Ctrl + Alt + Delete, which I think most people have already done.
2. Another way is to press the second key combination mentioned above, Ctrl + Alt + Delete, and then click the Task Manager link.
3. Press Windows Key + X or right-click the start button and you will see the power menu, which has a link to the task manager.
Task Manager overview
You should now see a Task Manager dialog box on your computer screen. By default in Windows 10, you’ll see a smaller version that just gives you a list of running apps.
To close a program that is not responding, simply click on it and click the End Task button. Since most people will actually only use Task Manager for this purpose, Microsoft has decided to hide all the additional details, unless someone really wants to see them.
Since we want to see more than just running applications on our computer, click on “More”. The Task Manager will open with all tabs.
Process, Information and Service Tabs
Operations, Details, and Services tabs
The Processes tab is displayed by default. The list of processes is broken down into three main categories: applications, background processes, and Windows processes. Applications will provide you with a list of all programs currently running on your computer. These are the ones that appear on the taskbar or taskbar.
Background processes are all Windows Store apps and third-party apps running on the system. You can see some of the processes that are running here in the taskbar. Most others are background processes that will sit idle until you open a program or until a scheduled task starts.
The Windows process section consists of all the basic processes required for Windows 10 to function properly. It is mainly composed of many service host (svchost.exe) processes. I wrote earlier that svchost.exe can sometimes cause high CPU usage, but in order to fix the problem, you need to 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. This is a quick way to diagnose a slow computer if, for example, one process takes up 95% of your CPU. Or, if one program is causing your disk usage to 100%, you can see it here.
The Processes tab is also handy for restarting Explorer All you have to do is right-click on Windows Explorer and choose Restart. In previous versions of Windows, you had to terminate the process and then start a new explorer.exe task, which was a problem.
If you right-click a process, a list of actions that can be performed on that process appears.
You can complete a task, create a dump file, go to details, open a file location, search the web, or view properties. The end task will continue and kill the process. Only developers use the dump file, and you don’t have to worry about anything. Going to details will take you to the Details tab, where you can see the process ID.
Under the heading Description, you will receive additional information about the company or program associated with this process. Another good option is a web search link. If you don’t know what the process does or where it came from, click on “Search the Internet” and it will search for that EXE file along with a description. The location of the open file is useful if you want to know the location of the EXE file on your computer.
Finally, if you right-click a process in the Details tab, you will also see the option to go to the Services tab. Note that you can set priority and binding for the process here. You should never change these values ??for any process unless you know what you are doing.
If there is a service associated with the process, you will go to the Services tab and highlight that particular service. However, not all processes have a service associated with them.
Here you can right click to start or stop the service and you can also open the services console from here. This screen will show you all the services on the system and show you which ones are running and which ones are stopped.
Hopefully this has given you a good understanding of the Task Manager in Windows 10 and what you can use it for. In part two, we’ll talk about the Performance and Application History tabs. Enjoy!
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