WizGidget

Last week I left off with a description of the Processes tab in Task Manager, which is where we’ll continue this week.

I mentioned last week to be careful when you kill (“End”) a process.  There are some processes that will render your computer unstable or cause it to reboot if they are killed.  Svchost.exe is a good example – you may have noticed that there’s a bunch of them.  You may be able to kill one or two of them off, but you’re playing russian roulette — you don’t know which one is going to blast your computer’s brains and cause a hang or reboot.  McAfee published an update to their antivirus suite awhile back that clobbered the actual  svchost.exe file — after which the PC would not boot.  Fun, eh?  I, fortunately, don’t use McAfee.

Another thing that’s handy to do with the process list is to become familiar with the processes that are running there.  If you see a process that you don’t recognize, you can search it on Google.  You’ll most likely find information on what that process is and what software package it goes with.  You might even find one that’s an actual virus, although often these days viruses disguise themselves as legitimate processes — like svchost.exe.  I actually found one once, when I’d connected my Windows-2000 laptop up to a client’s network with no firewall.  Within 30 minutes my laptop had been infected with the MSBlaster virus.  I discovered it when my laptop started behaving peculiarly, and noticed the msblaster.exe process running.  That looked suspicious, so I checked it out and eliminated the virus.

You can also use the Processes tab to figure out which processes are being memory hogs.  Firefox, while my favorite web browser, seems to have a memory leak, and especially if it has a website loaded that has flash images.  The only solution for that is to occasionally kill Firefox so that it will free up the memory.

Lastly, there’s a Performance tab, that shows a graph of CPU and Page File (PF) usage, which is a measure of how much memory you’re using.  The PF graph is something to watch, because if the memory usage approaches or exceeds the amount of physical memory your computer has, it will slow things down considerably.  How can the memory usage exceed the memory available, you might ask?  Because Windows will swap pages of memory out to disk so that it can effectively have more virtual memory than it has physical memory  That’s why the graph is called the “Page File” graph instead of “Memory” graph.  The problem is that swapping memory pages in and out to disk is horribly, interminably slow, at least in terms of computer time — disk acess is maybe a thousand times slower than physical memory access.  How do you know how much memory you have?  There are several boxes with numbers underneath the PF graph, one of which is labled Physical Memory, which also lists the “Total Memory”.  Divide that number by a million to get physical memory in Gb.  Mine has 2612588,  which translates roughly to 2.5Gb of memory.

Windows has a nifty tool called Task Manager which is handy for a number of things.  You can access Task Manager with a right-click in the taskbar, somewhere that there’s not an icon already showing. You can also get the Task Manager with a control-shift-escape key sequence (press and hold the control key, then simultaneously press and hold the shift key, then press the ESC key).

One of the more common uses for Task Manager is to stop a program that won’t stop when you click the window’s “close” button (the X in the upper right corner.)  Once Task Manager is running, the Applications tab will show the list of active user programs you have currently running.  There are probably other programs running that don’t show in the Applications tab, but we’ll cover those later.  Once you find the program you need to stop from the list, you can right-click the program and then select “End Task.”  You may get a dialog box if the program doesn’t want to stop quickly.

The next tab is the Processes tab, which lists *all* of the programs running, including many programs that are set to run as a “service”.  This will often be a fairly long list.  You may recognize some of those processes, such as firefox, Outlook, or iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer).  You can also stop programs from this list, but be careful: killing the wrong process can cause your computer to be unresponsive or even reboot.  “svchost.exe” is one of those, and you’ll probably see several “svchost.exe.”  They act as sort of a “wrapper” that in turn run other programs like your networking services.

When you right-click on a process in the Processes tab, you may also notice an option to “Set Priority.”  This allows you to define which programs are going to get preferred treatment by getting more time to run on the CPU.  If your computer is a bit slow, and you have a program running you want to run a bit faster than others, you can use this setting to help.

Another option from a right-click on a process is the Set Affinity. If, like son Jesse you now have a quad-core CPU (4 cpu’s in one CPU chip that run simultaneously) you can tune your applications by telling them which CPU core to use.  Windows does a pretty good job of divvying out the workload so it’s not usually useful, likewise if your computer only has one CPU core.

Finally, the Processes tab is handy for figuring out who’s being a cpu or memory hog.  You can click on the column headings to get Task Manager to sort those columns.  The first click is going to sort it from low to high, which isn’t very useful.  Click it again and it’ll sort from high to low, which makes the hogs float to the top.  Sometimes if my computer is being sluggish I’ll sort the CPU or Memory column and kill off the worst offender.

More on Task Manager next week.  This week’s article was suggested by spouse Ann, I’d welcome suggestions from other readers as well!