Have you ever wondered which program runs which processes? I know that I have. Go on, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to open Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. Do you know exactly what each process does? If your answer is “Yes”, then you are a computer genius. If “No”, I have good news for you – now there is a place where you can inspect windows processes and learn the truth about them
You won’t need to download any software – just open the website and type in a process name in the search box. Each process is rated (safe-unsafe-dangerous) and thoroughly explained.
How Is This Site Useful?
Let me give you an example.
Even if you know exactly which programs are installed on your computer, you can’t be sure it hasn’t got any malware. When your PC is infected, it might start acting weird, slow down, display pop-ups, etc. Or it might not. Malware will just run different processes in the background and you will never have a clue until something terrible happens. Like all your passwords, bank details and other personal information getting stolen.
Unfortunately viruses, Trojans, and other malware often mask themselves as safe files and processes. So even when you take a quick look at your Task Manager, you won’t notice a thing. For example, usually lsass.exe is a safe system file. But sometimes it’s a Trojan pretending to be lsass.exe.
Terminating Processes to Free Up Resources
Whenever a process is terminated by the user, all resources used by that process will be released and become available to other processes. If you are running ten processes on your system, each process might get only 10% of the total hardware resources. If you have a 1 GHz processor and 64 MB RAM, for example, each process might get CPU and memory resources corresponding to a 100 MHz CPU and 6.4 MB of RAM. This example is, of course, greatly simplified, and in reality some processes use many more resources than others. Still, because many users are running 50 processes or more, the amount of resources available to a game or an mp3 player can be considerably smaller than the total hardware resources. What can we do about this problem? As it turns out, there is actually a rather simple solution. Terminate!
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.
Have you ever wondered which program runs which processes? I know that I have. Go on, press Ctrl+Alt+Del to open Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. Do you know exactly what each process does? If your answer is “Yes”, then you are a computer genius. If “No”, I have good news for you – now there is a place where you can inspect windows processes and learn the truth about them
You won’t need to download any software – just open the website and type in a process name in the search box. Each process is rated (safe-unsafe-dangerous) and thoroughly explained.
How Is This Site Useful?
Let me give you an example.
Even if you know exactly which programs are installed on your computer, you can’t be sure it hasn’t got any malware. When your PC is infected, it might start acting weird, slow down, display pop-ups, etc. Or it might not. Malware will just run different processes in the background and you will never have a clue until something terrible happens. Like all your passwords, bank details and other personal information getting stolen.
Unfortunately viruses, Trojans, and other malware often mask themselves as safe files and processes. So even when you take a quick look at your Task Manager, you won’t notice a thing. For example, usually lsass.exe is a safe system file. But sometimes it’s a Trojan pretending to be lsass.exe.
Terminating Processes to Free Up Resources
Whenever a process is terminated by the user, all resources used by that process will be released and become available to other processes. If you are running ten processes on your system, each process might get only 10% of the total hardware resources. If you have a 1 GHz processor and 64 MB RAM, for example, each process might get CPU and memory resources corresponding to a 100 MHz CPU and 6.4 MB of RAM. This example is, of course, greatly simplified, and in reality some processes use many more resources than others. Still, because many users are running 50 processes or more, the amount of resources available to a game or an mp3 player can be considerably smaller than the total hardware resources. What can we do about this problem? As it turns out, there is actually a rather simple solution. Terminate!
