Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

(Darren Dugan) #1
If you see something running that shouldn’t, or that you no longer need
to have open, close the program. You can do that two ways:
Switch to the program. You can do this by clicking it in the task bar or
pressing the Alt+Tab key combination until the program is highlighted.
Close the program by using the standard shutdown process — usually
by clicking File➪Close.

You can also shut down most programs by clicking the Alt+F4 key
combination.
If the Task Manager is still displayed onscreen, you can use the Switch
To button to go to any open program. Highlight the program you want to
close, and then click the End Task button.

To examine programs and utilities running in the background, click the
Processes tab. Here you find some full programs as well as pieces of
foreground applications and Windows XP elements. An example of the
Task Manager Processes tab is shown in Figure 18-3.

Figure 18-3:
The
Processes
tab shows
the jobs
vying for the
processor’s
attention.
CPU usage
can drop to
0 percent or
so when the
computer is
idle; if usage
is near 100
percent or
the Commit
Charge ratio
is near 1:1,
you may be
overtaxing
the micro-
processor.

282 Part V: The Software Side of Life

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