Know What’s Running on Your Computer

One of the best resources I have for my Windows computer is the “Task Manager.” (Right click on your sidebar, and in the menu that appears, choose “Task Manager.” A new window will appear with several tabs. The Task manager shows what is currently running on your computer at the moment. The “Processes” tab has a “Processes Library.” This shows the individual file running.

Some of those names can be a little confusing or misleading. BEFORE you decide to “End Process” (killing the application), be sure to find out if it is an important program. You can do this by searching online for the application name. For example, do a search for “explorer.exe” and you will discover that this is a critical file. You can also bookmark a few reliable process library sites for future reference. The few I have found to be most reliable with concise information are:

ProcessLibrary
TaskList.org
Bleeping Computer

Be sure you know what a file is doing and know of its importance before you end the process, or you could cause your computer to crash. Searching for various processes also helps to determine and discover any malicious files or extra files that may not be necessary to run in the background (such as the Quicktime updater).