Windows deep dive
What Microsoft never told you about Task Manager
Most Windows users know about the Task Manager – the handy little tool that shows you which applications are running, and what resources they’re using. It also lets you easily shut down misbehaving apps with a click, which is jolly helpful when something’s slowing down your PC or appears to have crashed.
The Task Manager does a lot more than this, though, and even advanced users don’t fully explore all the features and information it offers. Here’s our guide to making the most of the Task Manager – including its hidden capabilities.
Opening the Task Manager
Everyone knows the Ctrl+Alt+Delete keyboard shortcut – but this isn’t the fastest way of accessing the Task Manager. Instead, the experts press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, which brings up the Task Manager right away. Not only does this save you a click, it can be easily done one-handed, so you can keep your other hand on the mouse.
There are several other ways to access it: press Win+X to bring up the “Power User” menu and you’ll see a direct link. Or, you can press Win+R to open the “Run” dialog and enter “taskmgr”. If you want to create a shortcut icon, or launch it from a script, the full path of the executable is C:\Windows\System32\taskmgr.exe.
1 Compact versus full view
In Windows 8 and 10, Task Manager appears as a simple list of running applications when you open it for the for the first time. From here you can kill programs using the “End task” button, or right-click on a process to access a few other options, including bringing the selected app to the forefront and revealing the location of the executable in an Explorer window.
This is a fraction of what Task Manager can do, however: click the “More details” link – with its slightly misleading downward arrow – to reveal the full interface in all its multi-tabbed glory. You can click “Fewer details” to revert back to the small view if you like; when you close the Task Manager, it remembers which mode it’s in, and reappears in that mode next time you open it. (If you’re in the full view, it will also remember the tab you were viewing.)
2T he Processes tab
The first tab in the main view is named Processes, and when the topic of Task Manager comes up in the pub – as it surely does most nights – this is probably the view that you think of. That is, a series of data columns detailing live statistics about each process that’s running on your PC. The most commonly useful bits of information are shown by default, such as CPU and RAM usage; right-click on the column headings and you can enable more, including the process ID (PID) of each running program, the command that launched it and what GPU resources it’s using. Two columns also give a description of each process’ power consumption, both right now and over time.
The purpose of the “Status” column may not be obvious because it’s
normally blank. However, if a program isn’t responding then that will be indicated here; if you see a leaf icon, that means an app has been suspended to save power and resources. You’ll only see this on Windows components and Store apps, though, as weighty desktop apps such as Adobe Premiere Pro can’t currently be suspended.
By default, user applications are grouped together and sorted alphabetically; scroll down and you’ll see a separate group of entries for background processes, and a third for Windows system components. If you click on a column heading to reorder the list by CPU usage, memory consumption or whatever, the groups are dissolved, and all types of process appear in a single list. Click the Name header to go back to the default view.
At the bottom of the pane, the “End task” button speaks for itself. If you click on the Windows Explorer process, the label changes to “Restart” – handy if one of your file windows isn’t responding. If a little arrow appears to the left of a program’s icon, you can click this to view individual windows, tabs or subtasks within that program, see how each contributes to the overall load and terminate subtasks – useful when a single page in your browser has crashed.
Right-clicking on a process brings up additional options. The “Resource values” settings let you decide whether memory, disk and network usage should be expressed in absolute terms (megabytes, megabytes per second and megabits per second respectively) or as percentages of your system’s total capacity. When you make a change, the entire column switches units, rather than just the selected process; it’s a bit counterintuitive but it keeps things readable.
The next option is “Create dump file”, which saves a snapshot of the state of the program at that moment in time for later inspection and analysis. This can be helpful if you are a developer trying to debug a program that isn’t behaving as expected; the rest of us don’t need to worry about it.
The remaining options give you ways to find out information about a running program. The “Go to details” option highlights the selected process in the Details tab – which we will discuss below – while “Open file location” brings up an Explorer window showing exactly where on your file system the item resides. “Search online” carries out a web search for its name – a bit of a blunt instrument, but handy for reassuring yourself that a particular item isn’t dangerous. The search opens in your default browser, although annoyingly it ignores your search engine preferences and always uses Bing.
At the bottom of the menu, “Properties” brings up the same window that you would see if you right-clicked on the executable file and selected Properties. Not thrilling, perhaps, but it’s a quick way to check a program’s publisher, security settings and so forth.
3 The Performance tab
While the Processes tab shows details of individual processes, the Performance tab reveals the big picture. Down the side, you’ll see mini graphs showing your CPU, RAM, disk, network and GPU over the past 60 seconds; you can double-click in this pane (or right-click and select “Summary view”) to shrink the Task Manager down to a minimal graphsonly display. The right-click menu also gives you the option of hiding the graphs and showing a numeric readout, but this takes up an almost identical amount of space.
The rest of the display is largely taken up by a bigger version of one of the graphs – you can choose which by clicking on one of the smaller ones, or right-clicking over the main graph. Again, you can double-click or select “Summary view” from the contextual menu to shrink the window to a floating graph.
In the lower part of the pane, a wealth of technical information appears, relating to whichever component you’re monitoring. If you right-click on the CPU graph, you can switch between a view of total utilisation and individual cores – helpful if you’re trying to see whether a program is taking advantage of multithreading or not. If you are using a workstation or server with multiple processors in a NUMA configuration (where each CPU has its own memory), you can alternatively view one graph per node. Right-click on the network graph and you can open a “Network details” pane, showing transmission statistics for all enabled network interfaces.
Last, but certainly not least, GPU performance is, by default, split into four graphs, so you can monitor 3D operations separately from video, compute and other workloads; a dropdown arrow by each one’s label lets you determine what it shows. If that’s overwhelming, you can right-click and select single-engine view; this shows just the one graph, although the dropdown remains so you can monitor whichever aspect of performance you’re interested in.
4T he App History tab
Ever wondered what apps and processes are quietly gobbling up CPU