How to Use Task Manager in Windows 10 and 11

Task Manager shows everything running on your PC in real time. Most people only use it to kill frozen apps — but it's much more powerful than that.

Open Task Manager

Ctrl + Shift + Esc — opens directly
Ctrl + Alt + Del → Task Manager
Right-click taskbar → Task Manager
Win + X → Task Manager

Processes Tab

Shows all running apps and background processes with their resource usage.

Sort by CPU or Memory — click the column header to find what's consuming the most resources.

End a frozen app: Right-click the process → End task

Find what a process is: Right-click → Open file location or Search online — useful for identifying unknown processes.

Process tree: Click the arrow next to a process to see child processes. Chrome and Edge show each tab separately.

# Get top processes by CPU from PowerShell
Get-Process | Sort-Object CPU -Descending | Select-Object -First 10 Name, CPU, WorkingSet

Performance Tab

Real-time graphs for CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, and GPU.

CPU:

Utilization — current load percentage
Speed — current clock speed
Processes / Threads / Handles — system load indicators

Memory:

In use — RAM currently used
Available — free RAM
Committed — total virtual memory committed

Disk:

High disk usage (90%+) with low transfer speed usually means failing HDD or HDD struggling with SSD-like workload

Click Open Resource Monitor at the bottom for more detail.

App History Tab

Shows cumulative CPU time and network usage per app over time. Useful for identifying apps that use a lot of resources in the background even when not actively used.

Startup Apps Tab

Shows programs that launch at Windows startup with their performance impact.

Right-click any item → Disable to prevent it from starting automatically.

Sort by Startup impact — disable anything High that you don't need immediately at login.

# View startup entries via PowerShell
Get-CimInstance Win32_StartupCommand | Select-Object Name, Command, Location

Users Tab

Shows all logged-in users and their resource usage. Useful on shared PCs.

Right-click a user → Disconnect or Sign off to free up their resources.

Details Tab

More granular process list with PID, CPU %, memory, and more.

Set process priority: Right-click → Set priority — increase to Above normal for a game or rendering task, decrease for background tasks.

Set CPU affinity (which cores a process uses): Right-click → Set affinity — useful for isolating a process to specific cores.

# Set process priority via PowerShell
$proc = Get-Process -Name "myapp"
$proc.PriorityClass = "AboveNormal"

Services Tab

Lists Windows services with start/stop controls. Shortcut to services.msc for full control.

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
`Ctrl + Shift + Esc`	Open Task Manager
`Alt + F4`	Close focused window (not Task Manager)
`Delete`	End selected task
`Ctrl + N`	Open new Task Manager window

Task Manager vs Resource Monitor vs Process Explorer

Tool	Best for
Task Manager	Quick overview, killing apps, startup management
Resource Monitor	Detailed per-process disk and network activity
Process Explorer (Sysinternals)	Deep investigation, DLL inspection, malware analysis

Download Process Explorer from learn.microsoft.com/sysinternals for the most powerful process inspection tool available for Windows.

Summary

Use Processes to find resource hogs and kill frozen apps. Use Performance for real-time system health. Use Startup to speed up boot. For deeper investigation, open Resource Monitor from the Performance tab or install Process Explorer.