How To Open Task Manager

So now, I'm going to show you how to open your Task Manager, but first of all, what is your Task Manager and why would you want to open it. Well, on your computer, there are lots of processes running all at the same time. Some of them might be obvious like your word processor or your email client, but other ones might be less obvious because they are running in the background.

This might be something like your instant messaging client or maybe your printer driver. Now, sometimes your computer can start to run quite slowly, and it also might be that an application has crashed and becomes unresponsive and you need to close it down. What task manager lets you do is have a look at all the processes that are running on your computer so you can see how many resources like memory, and processor and even network that they may be using.

And that gives you the opportunity to close any one of those processes down. So, let's have a look at how to do it. We're on windows Vista here, and what you can do is right click on the task bar at the bottom and click on task manager.

Now, this is almost identical in windows XP and also in windows 7. So you can see here in the processes tab that we have a whole list of different processes that are all running in the background. Some of them, you maybe recognize, some of them your probably don't.

You can also look at applications, and here for example you can see that we've got Google running in Internet Explorer. So, if we wanted to close that application, what we could do is click on 'end task'. Other things that we can is how your CPU utilisation is looking and also how much memory the programs on your computer are using.

And finally, it can be quite useful to have a look at your network utilisation to see if you've got any rogue processes running in the background. A word of warning here is that whilst this is all very interesting to look at and you can close down some processes that you might not want running, it can also be very dangerous, and in a worst case it can mean that you need to reboot your computer to get it working again. So that's how to open the Task Manager.

The Task Manager is a utility in Windows that lets you monitor your computers resources and shut down unresponsive/unwanted processes. Learn in less that three minutes how to use it to speed up your computer.