The Windows Task Manager

The Windows Task Manager is a great diagnostic utility for diagnosing performance problems with your computer. This is one of the first tools I use to begin to troubleshooting these type of problems.

The Windows XP Task Manager, has five tabs (Applications, Processes, Performance, Networking, and Users). Below is a breakdown of what each tab does:

• Applications: Displays a list of all of the active applications and their status.
  
• From here you can stop applications that are not responding or that are consuming too much of the CPU resources.
  
• Processes: Displays a list of active processes (foreground and background), plus the amount of memory and CPU time each process is using.
• From here you can stop processes that are not working properly.
  
• Performance: Displays how much free/used memory, and processing load on each CPU.
  
• Networking: Displays the utilization of your network connection.
  
• Users: Shows the users connected to your computer.
• From here you can log off users that are no longer logged on your system.