18 |^ |^ November 2019
Task Manager can help squash auto-running programs, but Autoruns can do a whole lot more.THE POWER
OF ELBOW GREASE
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is doing, can be better than a full operating system reinstall
Many people look at a Windows
reinstallation as a way to fix any
and all ills. However, we consider
it as being more of a last resort. It’s
a little like dealing with unruly
children. Before taking drastic
action and shipping your PC off
to military school, you should really
do everything you possibly can to
fix the problems you’ve got, and
find out the cause of its
misbehaviour, because you might
just find that a simple solution works
better. Heavy-handed metaphoraside, keeping a keen eye on your
PC’s actions isn’t particularly difficult,
because Windows 10 includes all the
tools you might need at your
disposal: There’s the Task Manager
(which you can pull up at any time
with a quick Ctrl-Shift-Escape);
there’s Resource Monitor (type
“resmon” into the search bar) for a
more detailed report on what’s
doing what; and there’s even the
difficult-to-grok but absolutely useful
Event Viewer, which can throw up
some worrying but utterly benignmessages, but also reveal the true
cause of system crashes
or slowdowns.Clean living
It is worth keeping your system
clean, not in terms of hard drive
space (unless you’re critically full, in
which case, you should definitely
start scrubbing), but in terms of the
number of things that are installed on
your system, how up to date they are,
and how many of them you allow to
just run whenever they like and eat
up your system resources in the
process. In terms of the latter, the Task
Manager startup tab can give you
some clues, not just about those
auto-running apps, but also about the
impact they tend to have on your“Keeping an eye on your PC’s actions
isn’t particularly difficult, Windows 10
includes all the tools you might need”
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