Track down those runaway applications

Windows applications running in the background, if poorly written, can wreck havoc on your PC. This article looks at how to track them down and kill them.
An operating system’s basic job is to run and mange running applications. It provides a toolkit to developers to allow them to create the programs we run everyday. Occasionally, these programs are written in such a way that they consume more resources than they should, even when no one is using them. When that happens, you will notice that your system performance may suffer. You can coral those runaway applications by using the Task Manager.

This Task Manager is a Windows applications that sits hidden under a menu in the task bar. It’s basic function is to show your running tasks and provide some control over those tasks.

Open the Windows Task Manager by clicking the right mouse button down in the Windows task bar and selecting Task Manager. The task bar is the bar at the bottom of the screen that shows running programs, the Start Menu and typically the clock.

Opening the Task Manager reveals all of the application programs currently running as well as running processes, and system stats. Select the Processes Tab.

The Processes Tab is a list of system services and applications running in your system. Applications that may be running in the background are listed here. The window shows the process name, and the the amount of CPU and memory resources it is consuming. For this article, we are interested in the amount of CPU cycles.

In this rather contrived example, I have a process using 65% of the CPU. Right click on the process and you are presented with some options. The option End Process and End Process Tree will stop the process in its tracks.

Beware that killing the process could result in a loss of data. If you kill your word processor without first saving your work, you will loose your work. It is extremely useful if you need to stop a process that is running in the background and consuming too many resources.

The Task Manager has many additional uses, one other such use is identifying malware. That is a subject of another article.