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The desktop of your PC is deceptive. What appears to you to be a serene, well organized environment is merely a mask hiding the chaotic dance of dozens of processes simultaneously running in the background. Most of these are essential to your PC’s operation, some are unnecessary and simply wasting your system’s resources, but a few could be malicious applications. Protecting your PC from viruses, spyware and other unwanted programs requires more than just having the latest firewall or the most up-to-date antivirus software. To protect your computer, data and personal information, you need to know exactly windows processes is running on your PC.

The first step is to look at all the processes currently running. You do this through the Processes tab in Task Manager. If you are running Windows XP, simultaneously press Ctrl-Alt-Del, or right-click the task bar at the bottom of the screen to open the Task Manager. In Windows Vista you can either simultaneously press Ctrl-Shift-Esc, or right-click the task bar at the bottom of the screen.

You now find yourself presented with a long, and rather cryptic, list of every application currently utilizing your processor, as well as, how much of the processor each is using. Some processes you may be able to readily decipher because they directly relate to a program that you are running at the time, such as iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer), WINWORD.exe (Microsoft Word), or TASKMGR.exe (Task Manager).

Most, however, will not be so obvious. For example, you will see svchost.exe with multiple entries on the list and, consequently, occupying a lot of your processing power. You might wonder if this application is truly necessary and what effect ending the process will have on your system. (Actually, svchost.exe is the part of the Windows Operating System that handles processes executed from DLL’s and is very important for the stable and secure running of your PC.)

Not all applications on the list are necessary. When you install software on your computer, the program will usually set itself up in your startup list. Every time you start up your PC each program on that list will install itself into your computer’s memory whether you are going to use it or not. Needless to say, these programs are merely wasting your system’s resources when not in use and could be stopped without any adverse effect on your PC’s operation.

Occasionally, despite having the latest firewall or the most up-to-date antivirus software a malicious application finds its way on to your PC. Since the list of processes found in Task Manager is quite cryptic, and it’s not exactly practical to commit to memory every legitimate process running on your PC, being able to determine the nature of each process is essential to the efficiency and security of your PC.

Finding out what each process is and how important it is to your PC’s operation isn’t as daunting of a task as it might seem at first. You can enter the name a process into your favorite search engine to find out that it does, or there are websites that can provide you with information about the processes, such as whether they’re friend or foe, or if they’re critical or if they’re just wasting your system’s resources.

Windows 7 Task Manager Processes

The Windows 7 task manager has undergone some major renovations. In this article, we’ll look at the Processes tab. The processes tab displays a list of all processes – not jut programs – running under Windows 7. Every program has at least one process, sometimes more. The operating system has several processes running. Background programs show up here as well.

A good example of a background program is a third party anti-virus software. In order to protect Windows 7 from a variety of threats, such software must be running all the time, monitoring program activities and network access to make sure that everything is behaving itself. This shows up as a process in the task manager, often an obscurely named one. The task manager is full of obscurely named tasks.