UPGRADE WINDOWS TASK MANAGER
Task Manager hasn’t changed much in appearance between Windows 10 and 11, but Microsoft no longer lets you launch it by right-clicking the taskbar. Instead, you need to right-click the Start button and choose Task Manager, or press Ctrl+shift+esc. Windows 11 does introduce an interesting new Task Manager feature called ‘Eco mode’, which stops background processes hogging your PC’S CPU, memory and power, but this hasn’t yet been added to stable builds of the operating system.
In the meantime, you can get a similar feature from Process Explorer, Microsoft’s alternative Task Manager for power users, which you can either download from www.snipca.com/40173 or as part of the Sysinternals Suite ( www.snipca.com/40201 – see our feature in Issue 614, page 62). What the program lacks in looks (its interface is rather cramped and confusing, though it looks better in Windows 11, as our screenshot shows), it makes up for in useful options for managing and viewing detailed information about PC processes.
To use its ‘Eco mode’ equivalent, right-click an entry in its Process list and choose Suspend or select Idle or Background from its Set Priority menu. This will free up system resources from that process, which you can later restore by choosing Resume in the right-click menu or setting its priority to Normal.
Another handy feature you won’t find in Task Manager is the ability to check if an unknown process is malicious using the malware-analysis service Virustotal ( www.virustotal.com).
Open Process Explorer’s Options menu and in the Virustotal.com submenu select Check Virustotal.com (see screenshot). Click ‘Yes’ to agree to the terms of service and a new Virustotal column will be added to Process Explorer. This shows you how many antivirus programs classify the process as malicious and lets you click the underlined score for a summary of the results.
Process Explorer helpfully colour-codes processes so you can see which are essential system services, third-party tools and new items – click Options, then Configure Colors to learn what all the colours represent.
You can set the program as your default Windows task manager by clicking Options, then Replace Task Manager and choosing Yes to confirm. It will then open when you use one of the usual Task Manager shortcuts mentioned earlier.