Better Understand Your Computer-Windows Task Manager

To kick off our new domain name, I've picked a topic that will serve great benefit to understanding modern computing. This information will help to improve your computer skills and allow alot less maintenance because you will be better informed. Yeah what the hell am I talking about, a 250 page textbook? No, as much as I would love to try to sell you something, I am just going to talk about Windows Task Manager. Mr. Ctrl+Alt+Del, the guy we all get to know as our computers become inferior to newer technology and higher grade software.

Luckily for me the Windows Task Manager, which I will abbreviate WTM, is the same in most Windows OS's used today. The first piece of information that you probably didn't know about, is when using the Windows Task Manager (accessed by Ctrl+Alt+Del for the real newbs out there ;) the most important tab to you is the processes tab. NOT the Applications tab.

Since there is so much that can be identified in WTM, some of it I will save for a secondary tutorial. I took the liberty of putting my own WTM up to walk through with you. First thing I want to stress is common computer users should learn the basics of WTM; because the information provided in this one window will clear up alot about what is going on in your computer.

We first see that there is a list of titles with the extensions .exe which stands for executable. These are more than likely ALL the programs that are running in your background. Anything not listed or shown is 9.9/10 a virus or something malicious. Each exe has a "User Name", CPU usage, and RAM or Memory Usage. At the bottom, I can identify the total amount or Proccesses,CPU, and Commit Charge (Commit Charge won't be of use to my tutorial.) You should be able to tell what each exe is, such as "aol software", I know that I have AIM running so this must be apart of AIM (Aol Instant Messenger.) I can see that this particular part of AIM is using about 4k of my RAM resources, but not actively using my CPU. Numbers under 20k are ideal normal programs like firewalls, messengers, e-mail, and so on. That 20k and lower is a nice amount to be used for the average program so we wont worry about it. Now look at firefox, my firefox is using a hefty amount, 97k, particularly because I am most actively on it. I have alot of free RAM because I am not using other RAM intensive programs. Thus I am not receiving any lagging from my computer. If you look occasionally in this area, you can sort of get a gist of what your ideal amount of memory being used is. The amount varies from computer to computer by how much RAM you have installed, I currently am poor, thus I have 512 mb installed ;).

Typically when your computer is going slow from a certain program, malicious or normal, the CPU is the number that will be high. CPU usage is measured in percent. So if an anti-virus program was scanning right now, it would have about 40k of memory used but about 60%+ of my CPU being used. This can heavily slow things down, the percent of your CPU being used will determine it's total processing power. Similar to my RAM, my CPU blows, so a simple virus scan will take up a large portion of my CPU. What uses the CPU is constant flowing information that needs to be processed and sent out to different areas of the computer. As you can determine yourself, Scanning programs, games, video etc will take CPU as well as RAM.

Hopefully this hasn't been too confusing. CPU is Processing, you can think of it as the thing that deals with active information. Memory Usage deals with your RAM, programs with alot of information to keep track of will use the most RAM. For example, a game that is half text based and half graphic based, will use CPU for the graphics area, and memory for the other areas. Graphic Cards have their own type of RAM specifically for graphics to relieve pressure on RAM that is used for your OS and other programs, so some massive games will use less memory than you would assume.

How do we apply this to our everyday computing lives? Like so, let's say that your computer is freezing and pausing badly, and you manage to get the life saver WTM up. Alot of beginner's to computers will try to get rid of the programs that "aren't responding" by ending their "task" from the default window in WTM. This is a waste of time and will take awhile to get done because Windows will take all the precautions before shutting it down so that you won't lose any information. More than likely, waiting for it to respond again will be the same amount of wait time then if you were to just End Task it. The best trick to do, is to go to the processes tab, and then organize your list a little.


Click on your Mem Usage tab, because if your computer is going slow, 80% of the time it will be because of heavy RAM usage. Clicking on the tab will organize the numbers in either ascending or decending order by greatest or least amount of memory used.

Okay our computer is lagging and I have this menu brought up, let's say that my CPU next to firefox is 80. I can quickly identify what is the problem, even though alot of the time you should already know. By experience you should know your computer enough to whether you should just shut the program down and restart, or wait for the computer to get back up to speed. I don't want to wait, so by selecting Firefox and clicking end proccess, the program is insantly closed after a confirmation in the prompt. I simply removed it from my RAM and closed it down. No memory loss, no restart or problems, the program is simply gone. This works EVERY time instantly, the only times this won't work is if the program is maybe a Anti-Virus program that protects itself by not allowing it to be shut down in any way other then it's user interface. If your still having problems ending a programs process, I will have a turorial up soon! Using this method is much more ideal then trying to end the processes and wait for good old Windows to make sure that everything is okay if it closes the program. You will also be able to identify and shutdown many malicious and useless programs to free up memory space!

Where is the connection between anything else I will do on my computer? Well, now that we know what we generally want loaded onto our computer, we can spot things that shouldn't be loaded. Fore example, if I had spyware on my computer running called WebAd. I can find WebAd, and look for any counterparts that may be running with it, and end them. Then I can go to Windows System Configuration (MSCONFIG, click here for information on using this) and locate this program/s and remove them from start up. You don't need to be having problems to visit your System Configuration Utility, now that you have an idea on what you want to run or stop from running on startup, you can weed out programs to have a faster boot up too! You now know a little more about what your RAM and CPU deal with! Basic troubleshooting will come just that much easier to you with this knowledge. Use it and build on it to be more efficient in using your computer.

The methods described are safe, and if there is information you have to be lost (like a word document) you WILL lose it if you chose to end that specific document. But if its an ordinary program like a browser that stumbled onto the wrong website, this ending the process will quickly solve your problem no questions asked. A secondary method, and more automatic, is editing the registry to prevent Windows from waiting too long on unresponsive programs. This guide is located here, the registry value you will want to change is named HungAppTimeOut. I suggest reading the entire guide ;).

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