A look at running programs

This situation is probably all too familiar to you – you turn on your computer, it boots up and you start using your PC – browsing the web, chatting with friends online, sharing photos, and more. Suddenly you notice your computer is slowing down, or your favorite sites are taking longer to load, or some unfamiliar program keeps popping up and asking you to do something.

These disruptions may be caused by unnecessary or malicious software running on your PC. Contrary to what some people think, the Windows Taskbar doesn’t actually show all the programs that are currently running. This is because it’s designed to show only the programs that were started by the user in the current Windows session; for example, an Acrobat document would be shown, but background tasks such as the Windows update process (or virus activity, in the worst case) would not be shown.

Windows Task Manager will give you a better insight into current program activity. Launched by pressing the Ctrl, Shift and Esc keys in combination, this utility is embedded in the Windows operating system and lists all active programs and processes. Processes is where you’ll discover those invisible applications you can’t see in the Taskbar.

Hit the Processes tab to display all the processes running on your PC currently. You can sort the contents by name, CPU utilization and memory usage, and you can instantly shut down any unwanted software. However, you should take care when shutting down a process whose name you’re not familiar with. It’s a good idea to Google the name of the process first to verify whether it is good or bad, and whether it’s necessary to the running of your PC. Shutting down a program via the Task Manager is an emergency operation and you risk losing unsaved data if you accidentally shut down the wrong program.