Inspect your PC with Task Manager

Even so, killing a program in this way is preferable to rebooting the computer and losing all work in progress.

Sometimes if a program is busy with a task that involves a lot of computation, it might be too busy to respond to Task Manager’s query about its health, so it’s a good idea to always wait for a while before killing a program by using the End Task button.

Another situation you might encounter is a program that refuses to die. You end it as a task, but then it keeps reappearing on the Applications tab. All you can do here is keep trying to end the task repeatedly until it eventually disappears, but if a non-responding program resists all attempts to end it, don’t be tempted to turn off your computer.

Instead, open Task Manager’s Shut Down menu and select Turn Off (or Restart) ­ – either is better than simply hitting the off switch, because programs will prompt you to save any outstanding files instead of losing them.

Weed out greedy programs
Whereas the Applications tab of Task Manager names the programs that the user has decided to run, the Processes tab lists the individual components of those programs alongside the many other processes that form part of Windows itself. By default, the Processes tab displays four columns of information.

From left to right, these are the name of the process, how it was initiated (by you or Windows), the percentage of processor time being used (labelled ‘CPU’ for central processing unit) and the amount of memory allocated to each process.

The key columns here are the CPU and memory allocations because they identify greedy processes that are grabbing more than their fair share of the computer’s resources and slowing things down for other tasks. To make identification easier, simply click any column heading to sort on that particular column. Click again if you would like to sort the column in descending order.

On a well-ordered computer, the process occupying most of the processor’s time is likely to be the System Idle Process. All this means is that the processor is busy doing nothing and can be made available for other tasks when needed.