This is the best utility that you can use to monitor the performance of your PC. The 'Task Manager' monitors which programs are being ran and how much of your system resources each program is taking up.
'Task Manager' is effective as it monitors the two main components that run your computer, the CPU and Memory. Without going into too much depth at this time, the CPU (Central Processing Unit), the chip at the core of your PC, it performs all the calculations that programs utilise to perform everyday tasks. The performance of CPUs are measured in several ways but mainly by its clock speed, which in today's standards is measured in gigahertz (GHz). There are two types of memory used by your computer, ROM and RAM, however it is RAM (Random Access Memory) that defines how much and what you can run at one time on your computer.
Therefore because the 'Task Manager' monitors the usage of these components against the programs being ran at any given time. It is effective as you can work out which programs are using up the most of your resources, and then work out if these programs are necessary to have on your PC. If all programs are necessary, it may be a good indication that you need to upgrade your PC. If you don't require the usage of some of the programs installed on your PC, then you can uninstall them or stop them from constantly running when you are not using them. (See 'The msconfig utility' for further details on stopping programs from running).
There are several ways to launch the 'Task Manager':
1.) Right click on the 'TaskBar' and select 'Task Manager'.
2.) Press 'Ctrl' and 'Alt', and then 'Delete' on the keyboard, you may need to then select 'Task Manager' from an option.
3.) Type 'taskmgr' into 'Run' on the 'Start Menu'.
There are other ways to launch the 'Task Manager' but these are the easiest ways to do so.
Once you have launched the 'Task Manager' you will be on the 'Applications' tab, on this tab you are given a basic view (but not the full picture) of what is being ran on your computer at that moment. This is generally a list of the programs that are open on your 'Start Menu'.
From here you can easily close the program by clicking on 'End Task', or navigate to the program by 'Switch To' and 'Bring to Front'.To start checking the usage on resources from these programs, right click on a program that is open and select 'Go To Process'. If no programs are open at the moment click on the 'Processes' tab.
From my example as seen above, I have selected to see the 'Microsoft Paint' application process and this has taken me to the 'Processes' tab. Here you have list of all the programs that are being utilised by 'Windows' at that moment in time. 'Microsoft Paint' is being highlighted in blue and you can see the program being shown as it's executable (.exe), which indicates it is a program, in this case 'mspaint.exe'. You can see the 'CPU' usage as a percentage from the column, in this case it is '00', as when this screenshot was taken, no activity was taking place, because I was using the 'Task Manager', process 'taskmgr.exe', which is using 6% of the CPU (as seen above). On the final column you can see 'Mem Usage', how much memory that is being used by the program, which for 'mspaint.exe' is '1,132 K', this is 1,132 kilobytes (KB), which is around 1 megabyte (MB). This however is low intensive application, PC games on the other hand can take up much more, such as 256MBs for examle.
Putting this into perspective then, on a PC that has 512MB of memory, it can be said that you are using 256 / 512, or a half of the memory that is available. Windows is clever though, in that it creates a paging file on the hard drive to use virtual memory to help you run more programs then what your memory can take. However this results in slow performance as the CPU needs to access the hard drive for memory usage which is much slower than accessing RAM, therefore it not recommended to exceed the physical memory limit installed on your PC.
Using the 'Processes' tab you can quickly identify at any given time the programs that are using the most resources on your PC. This is a powerful tool as you can remove any programs that you do not use, which is taking up a lot of resources, by identifying the '.exe' of the program, a search into 'Google' can usually determine what the program is. Programs that take up a lot of CPU usage, causing the overall CPU level to be over 80% will slow down the performance of your PC, the same can be said for memory. Programs using a lot of memory to the amount of the physical memory installed, will stop you from being able to run other programs smoothly or at all.
You can also stop a program from running at any time and usually immediately by using the 'End Process' button on the highlighted process. This is useful if you want to free resources or unstuck your PC by stopping a rouge exe (usually a virus) so that you can save other programs before determining what the problem is.
Warning: Take care to identify what process you are ending, you do not want to end a process that protects your PC, such as anti-virus or firewall software in a bid to free resources, if you can avoid it. Also do not end a process that is being used by Windows in order to run your PC, most of which are marked as 'System' in the 'User Name' column, as this may crash your PC, or force an automatic system restart.