An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance - Part 2

Posted on May 9, 2007 at 10:02 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Windows Task Manager series!

  1. An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance - Part I
  2. An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance - Part 2
  3. An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance - Part 3

Ok, so continuing on from the previous post about ending programs in Task Manager, now we’re going to hit on what the Processes tab lets us do.

Now we ended off saying that if your program does not die by click the End Task button on the Applications tab, then you can right click on the program and choose “Go to process“. This will bring you to the Processes tab, which is actually the executable that is running in Windows for that particular program.

The process that is running that program is automatically highlighted when you choose the go to process option. The Process tab gives you more detailed information on every process running on the system, whether it be a user process or a system process. The Image Name is the name of the process, User Name is whether it is a user process or a windows xp process, CPU is the percentage of the processor time that particular application is taking up, and Mem Usage is how much of your computer’s memory is being taken up.

Now to really kill the program, you can right click on the process itself and choose either End Process or End Process Tree. Try end process first and if that does not work try end process tree. The process tree basically means that if this process was started up by some other process it, it will try to kill everything including the parent process.

Now also on this tab, you can view other information such as the processes that are taking up the most CPU or memory on the computer. This can prove to be quite useful if you installed a couple of applications as of late and all of a sudden everything is crawling. You can click on the headers of any of the columns to sort the processes. So if you want to see which processes are using the CPU, click on the CPU column and you should see the System Idle Process at the very top. If you see 0’s, click on it once more to sort high to low.

The System Idle Process is a system process that runs when the computer processor is not being used. You always want that to be fairly high. Also, now you’ll notice that the processes keep shifting up and down and that’s because one becomes active and then might stop and another process does some work, etc. At the bottom of the Task Manager window you’ll see the CPU Usage status. This number should be pretty low for a desktop computer. Less than 15% is a good rule unless you’re running a game or something of that sort. You can also sort the Mem Usage column and see which programs are hogging all of the memory. In my instance, you can see IE is eating up 108MB of RAM!!! That’s a lot!! I’m kinda curious as to why, I only have two windows open.

You’ll also notice that by default there are only four columns listed in the Task Manager for processes. You can actually choose a bunch more columns by clicking on View from the top menu and choosing “Select columns…“.

As you can see, there are a lot of properties for a process that you can view. Some of the more useful ones are PID, Page Faults, Thread Count, and Non-Paged Pool. If you’re interested, you can read more about these by doing a search on Google.

The last thing you can do for a process is to set how much of the CPU you want it to use and which CPU you want a process to run on. Of course, the second statement is only valid if you have a computer with more than one processor, but since dual cores are becoming common now, I figure I can show you how to run an application on just one processor.

If you right click on the process name, you see two options at the bottom, Set Priority and Set Affinity. Priority is exactly that: what kind of privilege do you want to give or take from a process. If you’re running something like an anti-virus scan, but hate the fact that it completely disables your ability to do anything else on the computer until the scan finishes, then you can reduce the priority given to the anti-virus software so that it doesn’t use up everything.

Here I am changing my eTrust anti-virus program to Low, so that it does it’s thing, but not by hogging all the CPU. You can also set the process to run one a particular CPU if you have more than one. Click on Set Affinity and you’ll get a dialog with 32 check boxes with everything disabled except for the number of processors on your computer:

By default, Windows will use the first processor on your computer the most for it’s tasks, so if you want to run a program on it’s own dedicated processor without interfering with Windows work, just uncheck the box for the first processor for that application! Pretty cool!

In the next post, we’ll talk about the Performance tab and Networking tabs.

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2 Responses to “An introduction to the Windows XP Task Manager: Processes, Programs, and Performance - Part 2”

  1. Richard FDisk said on : September 7th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    I know I’m not the only one that this has happened to:

    I open “Task Manager” and under the “User Name” column is nothing, absolutely nothing, only “System Idle Process” is assigned a User Name “System”

    can you elaborate on how to correct this problem, I do know it has to do with certain windows “services”

    Though I’m trying to keep my machine as slim as possible including stopping most of the “services” related to internet / networking etc. the machine is a “Stand alone” w/XP pro sp2 and not conected to anything, the internal LAN is disabled, and there’s no modem either, and I have no intention of ever “connecting” it either.
    I had a horrendous time trying to get rid of “(in)Security Center and Firewall” because I don’t need them, and don’t want them.

    I’ve seen on forums and other types of boards, some other people who are “connected” that have mentioned this problem about not having any “user name” in the “user name” column and no matter when or what process / program get’s started nothing ever shows up there?
    which if no user name is displayed could be masking a security risk like a VNC connection monitoring them.

    Cheers ▲
    ◄RfD►


  2. Itchy said on : April 20th, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    [quote]I open “Task Manager” and under the “User Name” column is nothing, absolutely nothing, only “System Idle Process” is assigned a User Name “System”[/quote]

    * Click Start, Run and type Services.msc
    * Locate Terminal Services and double-click it
    * Set the Startup type to Automatic, and click Apply
    * Click the Start button to launch the service manually.
    * Now Task Manager User Name field will show up.


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