IT

Windows Task Manager: The Complete Guide

Author: Chris Hoffman / Source: How-To Geek

The Windows Task Manager is a powerful tool packed with useful information, from your system’s overall resource usage to detailed statistics about each process. This guide explains every feature and technical term in the Task Manager.

This article focuses on Windows 10’s Task Manager, although much of this also applies to Windows 7.

Новости СМИ2

Microsoft has dramatically improved the Task Manager since the release of Windows 7.

How to Launch the Task Manager

Windows offers many ways to launch the Task Manager. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Task Manager with a keyboard shortcut or right-click the Windows taskbar and select “Task Manager.”

You can also press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and then click “Task Manager” on the screen that appears or find the Task Manager shortcut in your Start menu.

The Simple View

The first time you launch the Task Manager, you’ll see a small, simple window. This window lists the visible applications running on your desktop, excluding background applications. You can select an application here and click “End Task” to close it. This is useful if an application isn’t responding—in other words, if it’s frozen—and you can’t close it the usual way.

You can also right-click an application in this window to access more options:

Switch To: Switch to the application’s window, bringing it to the front of your desktop and putting it in focus. This is useful if you’re not sure which window is associated with which application.
End Task: End the process. This works the same as the “End Task” button.
Run New Task: Open the Create New Task window, where you can specify a program, folder, document, or website address and Windows will open it.
Always On Top: Make the Task Manager window itself “always on top” of other windows on your desktop, letting you see it at all times.
Open File Location: Open a File Explorer window showing the location of the program’s .exe file.
Search Online: Perform a Bing search for the program’s application name and file name. This will help you see exactly what the program is and what it does.
Properties: Open the Properties window for the program’s .exe file. Here you can tweak compatibility options and see the program’s version number, for example.

While the Task Manager is open, you’ll see a Task Manager icon in your notification area. This shows you how much CPU (central processing unit) resources are currently in use on your system, and you can mouse over it to see memory, disk, and network usage. It’s an easy way to keep tabs on your computer’s CPU usage.

To see the system tray icon without the Task Manager appearing on your taskbar, click Options > Hide When Minimized in the full Task Manager interface and minimize the Task Manager window.

The Task Manager’s Tabs Explained

To see the Task Manager’s more advanced tools, click “More Details” at the bottom of the simple view window. You’ll see the full, tabbed interface appear. The Task Manager will remember your preference and will open to the more advanced view in the future. If you want to get back to the simple view, click “Fewer Details.”

With More Details selected, the Task Manager includes the following tabs:

Processes: A list of running applications and background processes on your system along with CPU, memory, disk, network, GPU, and other resource usage information.
Performance: Real-time graphs showing total CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU resource usage for your system. You’ll find many other details here, too, from your computer’s IP address to the model names of your computer’s CPU and GPU.
App History: Information about how much CPU and network resources apps have used for your current user account. This only applies to new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps—in other words, Store apps—and not traditional Windows desktop apps (Win32 applications.)
Startup: A list of your startup programs, which are the applications Windows automatically starts when you sign into your user account. You can disable startup programs from here, although you can also do that from Settings > Apps > Startup.
Users: The user accounts currently signed into your PC, how much resources they’re using, and what applications they’re running.
Details: More detailed information about the processes running on your system. This is basically the traditional “Processes” tab from the Task Manager on Windows 7.
Services: Management of system services. This is the same information you’ll find in services.msc, the Services management console.

Managing Processes

The Processes tab shows you a comprehensive list of processes running on your system. If you sort it by name, the list is broken into three categories. The Apps group shows the same list of running applications you’d see in the “Fewer details” simplified view. The other two categories are background processes and Windows processes, and they show processes that don’t appear in the standard simplified Task Manager view.

For example, tools like Dropbox, your antivirus program, background update processes, and hardware utilities with notification area (system tray) icons appear in the background processes list. Windows processes include various processes that are part of the Windows operating system, although some of these appear under “Background processes” instead for some reason.

You can right-click a process to see actions you can perform. The options you’ll see in the context menu are:

Expand: Some applications, like Google Chrome, have multiple processes are grouped here. Other applications have multiple windows that are part of a single process. You can select expand, double-click the process, or click the arrow to its left to see the entire group of processes individually. This option only appears when you right-click a group.
Collapse: Collapse an expanded group.
End task: End the process. You can also click the “End Task” button below the list.
Restart: This option only appears when you right-click Windows Explorer. It lets you restart explorer.exe instead of simply ending the task. In older versions of Windows, you had to end the Explorer.exe task and then launch it manually to fix problems with the Windows desktop, taskbar, or Start menu. Now, you can just use this Restart option.
Resource values: Lets you choose whether you want to see the percentage or precise values for memory, disk, and network. In other words, you can choose whether you want to see the precise amount of memory in MB or the percentage of your system’s memory applications are using.
Create dump file: This is a debugging tool for programmers. It captures a snapshot of the program’s memory and saves it to disk.
Go to details: Go to the process on the Details tab so you can see more detailed technical information.
Open file location: Open File Explorer with the process’s .exe file selected.
Search online: Search for the name of the process on Bing.
Properties: View the Properties window of the .exe file associated with the process.

You should not end tasks unless you know what the task does. Many of these tasks are background processes important to Windows itself. They often have confusing names, and you may need to perform a web search to find out what they do. We have a whole series explaining what various processes do, from conhost.exe to wsappx.

This tab also shows you detailed information about each process and their combined resource usage. You can right-click the headings at the top of the list and choose the columns you want to see. The values in each column are color-coded, and a darker orange (or red) color indicates greater resource usage.

You can click a column to sort by it—for example, click the CPU column to see running processes sorted by CPU usage with the biggest CPU hogs at the top. The top of the column also shows the total resource usage of all the processes on your system. Drag and drop columns to reorder them. The available columns are:

Type: The category of the process, which is App, Background process, or Windows process.
Status: If a program appears to be frozen, “Not Responding” will appear here. Programs sometimes begin responding after a bit of time and sometimes stay frozen. If Windows has suspended a program to save power, a green leaf will appear in this column. Modern UWP apps can suspend to save power, and Windows can also suspend traditional desktop apps.
Publisher: The name of the program’s publisher. For example, Chrome displays “Google Inc.” and Microsoft Word displays “Microsoft Corporation.”
PID: The process identifier number Windows has associated with the process. The process ID may be used by certain functions or system utilities. Windows assigns a unique process ID each time it starts a program, and the process ID is a way of distinguishing between several running processes if multiple instances of the same program are running.
Process Name: The file name of the process. For example, File Explorer is explorer.exe, Microsoft Word is WINWORD.EXE, and the Task Manager itself is Taskmgr.exe.
Command Line: The full command line used to launch the process. This shows you the full path to the process’s .exe file (for example, “C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE”) as well as any command-line options used to launch the program.
CPU: The CPU usage of the process, displayed as a percentage of your total available CPU resources.
Memory: The amount of your system’s physical working memory the process is currently using, displayed in MB or GB.
Disk: The disk activity a process is generating, displayed as MB/s. If a process isn’t reading from or writing to disk at the moment, it will display 0 MB/s.
Network: The network usage of a process on the current primary network, displayed in Mbps.
GPU: The GPU (graphics processing unit) resources used by a process, displayed as a percentage of the GPU’s available resources.
GPU Engine: The GPU device and engine used by a process. If you have multiple GPUs in your system, this will show you which GPU a process is using. See the Performance tab to see which number (“GPU 0” or “GPU 1” is associated with which physical GPU.
Power Usage: The estimated power usage of a process, taking into account its current CPU, disk, and GPU activity. For example, it might say “Very low” if a process isn’t using many resources or “Very high” if a process is using a lot of resources. If it’s high, that means it’s using more electricity and shortening your battery life if you have a laptop.
Power Usage Trend: The estimated impact on power usage over time. The Power Usage column just shows the current power usage, but this column tracks power usage over time. For example, if a program occasionally uses a lot of power but isn’t using much right now, it may say “Very low” in the power usage column and “High” or “Moderate” in the Power Usage Trend column.

When you right-click the headings, you’ll also see a “Resource Values” menu. This is the same option that appears when you right-click an individual process. Whether or not you access this option through right-clicking an individual process, it will always change how all processes in the list appear.

Task Manager Menu Options

There are also a few useful options in the Task Manager’s menu bar:

File > Run New Task: Launch a program, folder, document, or network resource by providing its address. You can also check “Create this task with administrative privileges” to launch the program as Administrator.
Options > Always on Top: The Task Manager window will always be on top of other windows while this option is enabled.
Options > Minimize on Use: The Task Manager will be minimized whenever you right-click a process and select “Switch To.” Despite the odd name, that’s all this option does.
Options > Hide When Minimized: The Task Manager will stay running in the notification area (system tray) when you click the minimize button if you enable this option.
View > Refresh Now: Immediately refresh the data displayed in the Task Manager.
View > Update Speed: Choose how frequently the data displayed in the Task Manager is updated: High, Medium, Low, or Paused. With Paused selected, the data isn’t updated until you select a higher frequency or click “Refresh Now.”
View > Group By Type: With this option enabled, processes on the Processes tab are grouped into three categories: Apps, Background Processes, and Windows Processes. With this option disabled, they’re shown mixed in the list.
View > Expand All: Expand all the process groups in the list. For example, Google Chrome uses multiple processes, and they’re shown combined into a “Google Chrome” group. You can expand individual process groups by clicking the arrow to the left of their name, too.
View > Collapse All: Collapse all the process groups in the list. For example, all Google Chrome processes will just be shown under the Google Chrome category.

Viewing Performance Information

The Performance tab shows real-time graphs displaying the usage of system resources like CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU. If you have multiple disks, network devices, or GPUs, you can see them all separately.

You’ll see small graphs in the left pane, and you can click an option to see a larger graph in the right pane. The graph shows resource usage over the last 60 seconds.

In addition to resource information, the Performance page shows information about your system’s hardware. Here are just some things the different panes show in addition to resource usage: