Windows Task Manager

[Guest]

I need a little background on the task manager, I understand the Applications
tab, but I am have a little trouble understanding the other two.

The processes tab, I assume is the number and names of all processes running
in the background. Question 1. Are there anything running in the background
(general processes) that is not needed?

Question 2 concerning the Performance tab. What is the CPU Usage Percentage
figure mean and MEM Usage is the amount of physical memory being occupied at
a given time and if the CPU Usage is at 100% would that mean that performance
would be slower? Thanks for any insight in this two tabs.


Also, This may be OT but is there any program out there that can tell you
what type of memory or other systems functions that a computer is running. I
tried to go to a memory maker's website to order but the program they use to
determined the type of memory your computer has doesn't run on Windows 2000.

Thanks again

 

[JM]

quoting:

I need a little background on the task manager, I understand the Applications
tab, but I am have a little trouble understanding the other two.

The processes tab, I assume is the number and names of all processes running
in the background. Question 1. Are there anything running in the background
(general processes) that is not needed?

(in a single user environment) I was able to remove the non-essentials.

This is what mine looks like a boot time.

-2 Idle
8 System
136 smss.exe
164 csrss.exe
184 winlogon.exe
212 services.exe
224 lsass.exe
396 svchost.exe
412 spoolsv.exe
452 svchost.exe
480 WinMgmt.exe
764 Explorer.exe

This took alot of fooling around with the "services" aplet, and some
registry tweaking to reduce and keep svchost.exe from loading more than two
copies.

Question 2 concerning the Performance tab. What is the CPU Usage Percentage
figure mean and MEM Usage is the amount of physical memory being occupied at
a given time and if the CPU Usage is at 100% would that mean that performance
would be slower? Thanks for any insight in this two tabs.

100% cpu usage means that the cpu is being used to the fullest extent. If
more than one program is using the cpu, then the cpu is shared. Generally,
you'll notice the performance drop when the cpu usage is at or close to
100%. and mem usage is the amount of memory being used.