The Task Manager has been around for a long time.
The app gives you access to many functions that can help with your efforts to monitor, control and optimise your operating system. It can also be used to diagnose system problems by showing abnormal use of resources. High usage of CPU, Memory, network or disk usage can indicate problems whose cause needs to be found and reduced. If you are tweaking your system settings you will want to see how effective they are by reviewing the relevant categories.
The Task Manager has been around for a long time.
The app gives you access to many functions that can help with your efforts to monitor, control and optimise your operating system. It can also be used to diagnose system problems by showing abnormal use of resources. High usage of CPU, Memory, network or disk usage can indicate problems whose cause needs to be found and reduced. If you are tweaking your system settings you will want to see how effective they are by reviewing the relevant categories.
Cool Geek Clues
Exploring Running Processes in Windows 10
To explore the running processes the Task Manager needs to be opened. Refer to Accessing the Task Manager for various ways to find this app
Overview
This Task Manager tab shows various parameters for the running processes. It shows the amount of resources being used by these processes. Comparison is useful if you are making changes due to excessive use or making improvement tweaks. All columns are sortable. For instance if you have constant heavy disk unit clicking on the column will sort it in ascending or descending order and enables you to identify processes that are hogging the disk. The view above for instance is sorted by the Name column which also shows Apps and Background processes grouped separately. This is the default view. One of the most useful attributes is the ability to kill or end a process or application that is hung thus circumventing a hard restart. We explore some of these options below but end users are encouraged to test different options for themselves.
Ending a stalled task
If a task is stalled then activate the task manager (Refer to Accessing). For convenience this is shown in the Fewer details view below. The stalled application will show as (Not Responding). Highlight this and press the End task button at the bottom of the panel. This method can be used to end any running task or process in the fewer or more details view. Very useful if you are experimenting to detect any resource hogs that may be safe to stop.
The Columns
The columns contain the usage data that you need for your exploration and diagnosis. The default view shows the first 6 columns as shown in the table below. The order of the columns can be changed by dragging them, The positions are persistent and will show the nex time Task Manager is activated
Columns Right Click Menu
When you right click on the header of any column a context menu appears as shown below. Columns can be selected or deselected.
Resource Values Options
If this option is selected the three categories above show and for each there is an option to show as a percentage or in values used for the measure e.g. Mbps. The same options also appear on the context menu for individual tasks as shown below.
The Process Context Menu
Further options are provided by right clicking on a running process, not a grouped set for a process as shown with a >, and a context drop down menu will open
End task - Stop a running process or app
Resource values - AS explained above under columns
Create dump file - Takes a snap shot of the App, This is an advanced topic outside the scope of this article. Refer here for a MSDN article
Go to details - Takes you to the details tab here
Open file location - Takes you to the file manager
Search online - Takes you to your default search engine with a query for the app so you can research.
Properties - A window opens to show various properties associated with the apps executable file.