Windows Task Manager Tutorial

Operating systems did jobs by running processes and tasks. One of the primary duties of an operating system is the management of processes. All operating systems have a different type of task manager. Windows have built-in task manager maned Task Manager . In this tutorial, we will look detailed about Windows Task Manager.

Start Task Manager

There are different ways to start Task Manager. One way is using Run command box providing taskmgr like below.

Another way is Right click to Task Bar and click to the Task Manager .

List Applications

Applications tab provides currently running User space graphical applications. In a system actually there a lot of applications running but only some of them are GUI applications directly interacted by the user. This tab lists these applications. We can see from the example that the user is currently running Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome .

List Processes

Processes tab will list all processes that are running on the system. Some processes may be running on the background. There are following information about processes

• Image Name columns show processes executable name.
• User Name column shows the user who owns and started the process.
• CPU column shows the CPU usage percentage of the process.
• Memory columns show the memory usage of the process.
• Description column show more detail about the process.

Add New Column

We can also add a new column to get different information about processes. In order to add column we need to list available columns with View -> Select Columns... like below.

After that, windows like below will be shown.

In this window, we can select which columns we want to list just by checking. Important of the columns are;

• CPU Time
• Threads
• I/O Reads
• I/O Writes
• Command Line

Show Processes From All Users

By default task manager will only list processes owned by the current user. In our example the current user is ismail . But we may need other user processes to list. This can be done with the checkbox below the left corner. This will list all users like SYSTEM . NETWORK , LOCAL SERVICE and other normal users.

There is also information about total process numbers, total CPU usage, and memory usage.

Services Tab

Services or daemon generally works background. Services do not need any GUI. Services also run always not like a process. Because the process starts and ends in some time. We can list services with Task Manager in the Services tab

• Name column shows the name of the service
• PID column shows the process ID of the service
• Description column shows more information about the service
• Status column shows the current working condition like Stopped or Running of service
• Group column shows a related group of the service

Performance Tab

Task Manager also provides information about the system resources. Task Manager provides load information about CPU, Memory. There are the following information;

• CPU Usage
• CPU Usage History
• Physical Memory
  • Total
  • Cached
  • Available
  • Free
• Threads
• Process
• Uptime

Networking

In the networking tab, the network interfaces listed as graphs and their network speed and usage percentage are shown. There is also information like network interface connection status, link speed

Users

In the User tab currently, connected users are shown. In this example, we see that the use named ismail is connected to the local system with the ID 1 and session type is console which means a local desktop session.

• User column shows account computer and name
• ID columns show user connection ID
• Status column shows current user status whether is connected or not
• Session columns show where the user connected. This can be console or terminal

All ways On Top

If we want to Task Manager window always stay on top we can set this from Options a menu like below. This will always show the Task Manager on the top of the open windows and applications even they are opened later than Task Manager.