At first glance Task Manager looks like nothing more than a geeky way to tell you what you already know, the names of the programs running on your PC.
Explore out favourite Task Manager tricks, though, and you'll find all kinds of options for monitoring your system, detecting and resolving problems, especially in its most modern Windows Vista/Windows 7 incarnation. Here's what you need to know.
1. Browse your processes
Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to launch Task Manager. By default the first thing you'll see is the Applications tab, but this is misleadingly named and of little much use as it just lists top-level windows. If you want to see what's actually running on your PC then click the Processes tab, click "Show processes from all users", and scroll down the list. If you don't know what a process is then right-click it and select Properties to get more information, such as the folder where it's stored, which will usually offer additional clues.
2. Troubleshoot startup problems
Windows Media Player is known to crash from time to time (you may have noticed this). Occasionally it'll crash without having any visible window, though, so you won't see there's a problem. Then, when you come to restart the program, nothing will happen because it's blocked by the crashed copy in RAM.
If you find Windows Media Player won't launch, then, fire up Task Manager, click the Processes tab and look for a WMPlayer.exe process. If you find one, and there's no window, then it's probably crashed. Right-click it in Task Manager, select End Process, and once it's shut down you should be able to start Media Player as normal.
Much the same problem can happen with other applications, so if something won't start, or is just misbehaving, then it's always a good idea to look for previous instances of the program. Don't use the "End Process" on anything unless you're 110% sure that it's safe to do so, though - terminating something system-critical can lock up or crash your PC immediately.
