Inspect your PC with Task Manager

The name Task Manager could easily lead you to believe that it’s a tool built into Windows to help you manage your tasks. However, the tasks it manages are not yours; they’re the internal workings of Windows itself.

Normally we’re so busy managing our own time that we don’t pause to wonder how Window juggles all its responsibilities, but when your computer inexplicably slows down or a program stops responding, you can use Task Manager as a sort of inspection hatch to peer inside Windows to see what’s going on – and then take appropriate action.

How to start Task Manager
If you’ve seen Task Manager in the past, chances are that it sprang into view in response to the three-fingered salute of Ctrl, Alt and Delete ­ the time-honoured key combination that is used to restart older computers. In fact, this is only one way of starting Task Manager, and for Windows Vista users it’s not the best, because instead of displaying Task Manager directly, it interposes an intermediate menu.

To jump straight to Task Manager in both Windows XP Pro and Vista, the best key combination is Ctrl, Shift and Esc, although mouse lovers might prefer to right-click an unused part of the Windows Taskbar and select Task Manager from the menu that appears. XP Home users can stick with Ctrl, Alt and Delete.

Task Manager contains a number of tabbed sheets devoted to different aspects of Windows. The number of tabs varies according to how the computer has been set up and whether it’s running XP or Vista, but four that are always displayed are Applications, Processes, Performance and Networking. These are discussed below in greater detail. The information here relates specifically to XP; much of it is also relevant to Vista, but because Vista’s Task Manager contains a number of new features that make it even more useful, these have been outlined separately at the end of this feature.

Kick-start a crashed computer
The Applications tab is both the easiest to understand and the most immediately useful. It displays all programs currently running, as well as an indication of their state of health: usually the simple message ‘Running’, but occasionally the ominous ‘Not Responding’.

A program that isn’t responding can lock up the entire computer while waiting for a response that never arrives, but you can escape from this impasse by selecting the program on the Applications tab and clicking the End Task button. This closes the offending program but leaves all others running. The only downside is that if the program you close has any files open (such as a document being edited in Microsoft Word), then any changes made since the last save are lost.