Exam 70-270 - Understanding Task Manager

Task Manager is a tool commonly used to manage applications and processes running on a computer. There are now four tabs within the Task Manager window instead of two as seen with NT and the three with Windows 2000. The Applications tab serves to display all of the active applications on the system. Services and application-spawned processes will not appear with this tab. The Processes tab, however, will display all processes running on the server - applications, processes, and services.

From within either the Applications or the Processes tab, you have the ability to stop an entry. This doesn’t mean that you can always do so successfully. Many applications will spawn multiple processes which are wither system-protected, or so interrelated that stopping an application or process is impossible to do without compromising system integrity. When this happens, you will either be presented with a message indicating that the app/process cannot be stopped, or a cycle of messages that amount to the same thing.

One additional feature that is available with Windows XP is the ability to right-click on an application listed on the Application tab and click Go To Process. This will switch to the Processes tab, with the associated process highlighted. It will not, however, display all associated processes.

The Performance tab is used as a quick graphical means of looking at the most important parts of the system. The graphical displays for CPU utilization closely resemble Performance Monitor’s System Monitor. You do not have the ability to add objects and counters, but then again, you do not have to worry about associated system overhead either, since the Performance tab is always available. The Performance tab can be used as a constant display that will help you identify problems as they occur, such as memory leaks, or high CPU or pagefile usage.

New to Windows XP is the Networking tab will display network utilization for all installed network cards. Between this and the Performance tab, you can easily and quickly draw any correlations between network usage and CPU utilization. Although you cannot draw any hard-and-fast conclusions as to what a problem is, this is definitely the quick way to determine if the network is slow.

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