PC World - Hold on. Don't just reboot your Windows 7 PC. I realize that rebooting is the goto solution when a program won't shut down, or the system starts dragging or acting wonky, but there is another way. The Task Manager is a powerful tool for troubleshooting and resolving issues in Windows 7.
Task Manager lets you view the programs, processes, and services currently running on the PC. You can use Task Manager to monitor your computer's performance, and to close a program that is not responding, view network status, and see which users are connected to the PC.
You can have many applications open at once in Windows 7--limited only by the available memory and processor capacity of the PC. But what you see is a little like watching a duck on a pond. On the surface it seems to calmly glide along, while under the water its feet are furiously paddling away. Generally, Windows does an awesome job of prioritizing and managing all of the underlying processes and services, but every so often something goes awry. That is when you need to dive into Task Manager.
Starting Task Manager
To begin with, you have to open up Task Manager. You have a few different ways to do this.
- Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc.
- Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and then select Start Task Manager.
- Click Start, type "task manager" in search bar and press Enter.
- Right-click anywhere on the task bar and select Start Task Manager.
Use any of the above techniques, and you will open up the Task Manager console.
Vital Information at a Glance
At the bottom of the Task Manager window--no matter which tab you happen to be viewing--is a sort of dashboard view that displays the current number of running processes, the percentage of the processor capacity being used, and the percentage of physical memory.
The information displayed here can instantly let you know if a process or application is consuming all of the CPU or memory resources, which is your first clue for troubleshooting a problem.
Task Manager Tabs
Across the top of the main window in the Task Manager console are a number of different tabs: Applications, Processes, Services, Performance, Networking, and Users (Figure 3). We will dive into detail on the use of Applications, Processes, and Services, but the other three won't be covered comprehensively in this article because they are not as directly related to troubleshooting and resolving issues. Here is a brief summary of the last three tabs:
Performance. The Performance tab displays a real-time graph depicting processor usage (split to show the separate cores available for dual- or quad-core processors), and a real-time graph of the memory in use along with various details such as the amount of time the PC has been up and running, and the amount of virtual memory available to Windows. You can already see the overall processor and memory usage on the dashboard bar at the bottom of the Task Manager; however, by reviewing the usage graphs on this tab you can identify whether there is an issue with a specific core or cores within the processor. For example, if there is significant activity on one processor core, while the other is flatlined, you may have a defective CPU.
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