IN THIS CHAPTER
Starting and using Task Manager
What to do when your system freezes up
Viewing running processes
Monitoring performance and resource use
You are no doubt familiar with the terms application and program. These two terms describe program code that, whether one component or several components, serve a specific function. For example, a word processor is an application. Some applications, however, comprise multiple processes running at the same time. In addition, a process can comprise multiple threads of execution, each performing a specific task. Although you typically concern yourself with programs, you sometimes need to think about the processes that make up a program, particularly if one of those processes fails. That's where Task Manager comes into play.
Task Manager is a program included with Windows 8.1 for viewing and managing running programs and processes. You can use it to seek out performance bottlenecks, close hung programs and processes without restarting the system, and more.
Task Manager is a program that lets you view and manage running programs and processes, as well as view performance data for your computer and network. In Windows 8.1, Task Manager has changed from releases prior to Windows 8. If you're familiar with Task Manager in Windows 7, for example, you're in for quite a change with the new (and, in our opinion, improved) Task Manager.
You can start Task Manager in several ways:
Figure 32.1 shows the new Task Manager and a number of apps and programs running. Task Manager behaves much like any program window. It has a button on the Windows taskbar when open. You can drag the program window around by its title bar and size it by dragging any corner or edge. You can also configure it so it stays on the top of the stack of open windows so you can always see it. You can change that by right-clicking a blank area on the window or on the bottom of the window and choosing Always On Top.
With Windows 8.1 Task Manager, you have the choice of showing a list of just the running applications, as shown in Figure 32.1, or a display with multiple tabs filled with system and application data (as shown in Figure 32.2). The former view shows fewer details while the latter shows more details. When showing less detail, you have fewer options for controlling and viewing application information, but you can still stop an app or application.
To switch between detail views, click the More Details button on the bottom of Task Manager. When viewing the More Details view, you can click the Fewer Details button to display the less details view.
While viewing Task Manager in the More Details view, you can view and use Task Manager in several ways. On the Options menu in the menu bar, you have the following options:
Whenever Task Manager is open, you'll see a small greenish blue square in the notification area unless Task Manager is configured to show notifications only. Pointing to that icon displays the current CPU (central processing unit) usage, as shown in Figure 32.3. When Task Manager is minimized, you can double-click that little square to bring Task Manager back onto the desktop.
If you prefer to have Task Manager show only notifications and not appear in the tray, click the Show Hidden Icons button on the tray and choose Customize. In the notification area Icons applet, find Task Manager in the Icons list, choose Only Show Notifications from the drop-down list, and click OK.
On the View menu in Task Manager, you have the following choices, as shown in Figure 32.4:
One of Task Manager's most useful roles is that of dealing with problems that cause programs, or your whole computer, to hang (freeze up, so that the mouse and keyboard don't work normally). Even when you can't get the mouse or keyboard to work, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and choosing Start Task Manager may get Task Manager open for you.
Once Task Manager is open, select the Details tab, as shown in Figure 32.5. If a particular program is hung, its Status column usually reads Not Responding rather than Running. To close the hung program, click its name in the Name column, and then click the End Task button, which appears at the bottom right of the window. Task Manager tries to close the program normally, so that if you were working on a document at the time, you may be able to save any changes. (So, don't expect the program to close immediately.)
If the program won't close, you'll see a warning that moving ahead will close the program and leave unsaved work behind. To forge ahead, click End Process. The program may try to restart itself, depending on how it's designed.
Most likely, a process of reporting the problem and finding a solution will start after you end a program in this way. If you choose to allow Windows to send information about the program error, Windows sends information to a database of problems and searches that database for known problems and their solutions. You won't always get a solution to the problem, but you may receive information about an incompatible device driver or other issue by allowing Windows to report the problem.
If you don't have time to wait through that whole reporting process, you can cancel out of each dialog box by clicking its Cancel button.
If the system is hung in such a way that you can't use the taskbar normally, and you want to work with open program windows individually, Task Manager provides some ways to accomplish that.
To bring a running program to the top of the stack of windows on the screen and make it the active window, click its name in the list of running tasks on Task Manager's Fewer Details screen, and then click the Switch To button. If you were working on a document in that program, you can save your work, and then exit the program normally (assuming that program is running normally).
If you need to bring up a diagnostic program or debugger, or simply need to start some other program, and you know the startup command for that program, right-click and choose Run New Task. The Create New Task dialog box, shown in Figure 32.6, opens. Type the startup command for the program (or the complete path to the program, if necessary), and click OK. You can also access this dialog box when in the More Details view. Choose File ⇒ Run New Task.
If your computer is so locked up that you can't get to Task Manager, or stop the offending program, you can try other things. If pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del works, you are taken to a Windows 8.1 screen with four options: Lock, Switch User, Sign Out, and Task Manager. You also have the Shut Down option at the lower right of the screen. Logging off or restarting will likely be your best bet. If at all possible, Windows attempts to give you a chance to save any unsaved work.
If the program that's hung is also the one that contains the unsaved work, there may be no way to save that work. You may have to restart without saving. For this reason, you should save your work often.
In addition to helping you deal with hung programs, Task Manager lets you see which processes in your system are using computer resources. On the Performance tab, as shown in Figure 32.7, you can see these key resources. The Performance tab in Task Manager provides both graphical and numeric summaries of CPU, memory, disk, and network hardware resource usage. To watch resource usage, leave Task Manager open and always on top as you run programs and use your computer in the usual ways. If you have multiple processors or a multi-core processor, each may be represented in a separate pane in the CPU history, as shown at the top of the figure.
The Performance charts are useful for identifying major performance bottlenecks. For example, if the CPU charts run high, your CPU is working very hard. An errant application can consume inordinate amounts of CPU capacity. Also, reducing the number of running programs reduces CPU load.
A common performance bottleneck is limited physical memory. Running lots of programs when memory is limited forces the system to use lots of virtual memory, which in turn slows down performance because of the added overhead of swapping pages in and out. Increasing the amount of virtual memory (as discussed in Chapter 36) can help, but the best solution is to add more RAM (physical memory) to the system.
Some of the resources you may see include the following:
Exactly how fast your computer runs at any given moment depends on the resources available to it at that moment. For example, if you have half a dozen programs running, all doing intensive tasks, they're eating up CPU resources. If you start another program, that program may run slower than usual, because the other running programs are consuming CPU resources.
Likewise, everything you open stores something in RAM. If RAM is nearly full, and you start another program that needs more memory than what's currently left in RAM, Windows has to start sloughing some of what's currently in RAM off to the hard disk (called virtual memory) to make room. It takes time to do that, so everything slows down.
Whereas applications usually run in windows and are listed on the Processes tab in Task Manager, processes have no program window. We say that processes run in the background because they don't show anything in particular on the screen.
Your running applications are actually one or more processes. To see all currently running processes, select the Processes tab in Task Manager. Each process is shown under the Windows Process category heading, as in the example shown in Figure 32.11.
The Processes tab shows its information in columns. To help you differentiate between data values (that is, for data points that are low, medium, or high), Windows 8.1 uses a “heat map” paradigm. This type of display lets you look across columns and rows and data that represent different types of data (CPU, memory, disk, and network usages) and get a quick view of the data and see any hot spots in the values. For example, if memory usage for a process or application is high compared to other running processes or applications, the heat map shows a brighter orange color. Lower values are in lighter shades, such as light tan or light yellow. Microsoft designed these heat maps to allow users to visualize and digest the information quickly.
You can sort items by clicking any column heading. For example, you can click the Memory column to sort processes by the amount of memory each one takes up, in ascending order (smallest to largest) or descending order (largest to smallest). Seeing those in largest-to-smallest order lets you know which processes are using up the most memory.
Here's what each column shows:
Memory usage is probably the main cause of slow-running computers. The more stuff you cram into RAM, the more Windows has to use the paging file, and hence the slower everything goes. You can see which processes are hogging up the most RAM just by clicking the Memory column heading until the largest numbers are at the top of the list.
Windows 8.1 Task Manager provides additional columns of data that you can view on the Process tab. To see these columns, right-click on the column area. A menu appears with the names of the available columns, including the following ones that are not shown by default:
Figure 32.12 shows what Task Manager looks like when you turn on all the columns. The information shown in the default columns (CPU, Memory, Disks, and Network) appears on the far right of Task Manager, and in this example the window is too wide to fit in this screen shot.
You can resize columns by dragging the separator line between the columns.
You can end any running process by right-clicking its name and choosing End Task (or by clicking its name and clicking the End Task button). But doing so isn't a good idea unless you know exactly what service you're terminating. If a process represents a running program with unsaved work, ending the process will close the program without saving the work.
Some processes are required for normal operation of the computer. For example, Desktop Window Manager and Runtime Broker are important parts of Windows 8.1 so you definitely don't want to mess with those.
If you're unsure about a process, you can search for it by name on Google, Bing, or any other search engine. Just be sure to check out multiple sources and read carefully. Virtually every resource you find will tell you that perfectly legitimate and necessary processes such as dwm.exe
and explorer.exe
could be a Trojan, spyware, or other malicious item. But could is not synonymous with is. So, read carefully and don't assume the worst.
The Details tab on Task Manager provides additional ways to analyze performance issues with running processes. The columns that display by default are Name, User Name, CPU, Memory, Status, and Description.
You can choose to display other columns here in case you need to capture different types of data about a particular problem you're having with a program or Windows in general. To choose other columns to view, right-click the column area and choose Select Columns. The Select Columns dialog box appears (as shown in Figure 32.13). Each column shows some detail of the process, mostly related to resource consumption. A programmer might use this information to fine-tune a program she's writing. Beyond that, it's hard to think of anything terribly practical to be gained from this information. But here's a quick summary of what the other, optional columns show:
The new Windows 8.1 Task Manager includes the App History tab shown in Figure 32.14. This tab lists all the apps that you've used on this computer since a given time. By default, you can see history since the time you installed Windows 8.1. In actuality, you may want to click the Delete Usage History link periodically to remove all old app history. This will limit the amount of data Windows keeps stored in a log file somewhere on your hard drive.
The columns available on the App History tab include the following:
To launch an app or see related apps under a category of apps (look for an arrow to the left of a name), double-click the app name.
The Startup tab shows a list of the apps that start when you start Windows 8.1. Figure 32.15 shows an example of the Startup tab and the application that will start at boot up time. In this example, only one application will start when Windows starts.
The columns on this tab include the following:
If you don't want the app to start at boot time, select it and then click the Disable button.
The Users tab in Task Manager displays information about your user accounts. The Users tab (shown in Figure 32.16) shows the names of people currently logged in to the computer. Most users will see only themselves, even if other users are logged in.
If your system is running slowly because users are not logging out of their accounts, you can send a message to those users asking them to log off when done using the computer. Click a username and click Disconnect to disconnect that user. Any unsaved data will be lost. In general, this is a bad idea, so try to get the user to log off normally before taking this action.
To see the apps and processes that a user uses, double-click the username. Figure 32.16, for example, shows the apps listed under the aakivas user.
The Users tab includes the following columns:
The Services tab provides a view of the services running under Windows. This tab is discussed in more detail in Chapter 11.
A new Task Manager is available in Windows 8.1. Task Manager is a handy tool for terminating hung programs (programs that are not responding) and for monitoring computer resource usage. Task Manager also provides detailed information that's of interest only to programmers and network administrators. The following are the main things to remember about Task Manager: