Q. What is running on my PC?

How do I tell what programs are running on my machine that aren’t listed on the Task Bar?
Hit Control – Alt – Delete — this brings up the Task Manager.
Windows XP http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/taskman.htm
Windows 7 http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/reap-the-benefits-of-windows-7s-task-manager/2576
You can now view a list of applications, and a list of dozens of processes – which are the background tasks that make the applications run.

You will not be able to make sense out of all of the process names – and quitting them willy-nilly is a good way to crash your machine, so find out what they are before terminating them.

Write the names down, and then research with Google what each one does.
This site is a library of processes and their descriptions
http://www.what-process.com/

ProcessExlorer form Microsoft gives you more details http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

A good program for turning on and off processes that load at startup is Autoruns http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902

When you have a lot of processes running in the background, your machine has less memory and CPU power to devote to what you are working on.  By turning off toolbars, features, widgets, helpers, updaters, and other non-essential processes, your machine can perform faster.

Checking the running processes is sometime necessary to catch virus and malware infections. But there are a lot of legitimate processes running on any machine, so don’t panic if you see some names you don’t recognize, do a bit of research first.