How To Deal With A Slow Computer Using Task Manager And Process Freezer

Sometimes your computer just slows down. Even brand new installations slow down. This is caused by too many processes running in the background. Especially, anti-virus software and third-party firewalls. Normally the quickest solution is to reboot the PC and things should be back to normal. But it gets very frustrating when 1 hour later, you notice it struggle. Or worse still, its freezing you out of  your applications. Well what can you do about it? Lots!

Task Manager

The first thing you should do is press CTRL>SHIFT>ESC or Right Click the Taskbar and choose Start Task Manager. You will get a screen shot like this: This shows you a list of running applications that are open and using system resources. The first thing you should do is scan over this list and make sure there is nothing open that shouldn’t be. The second thing to look for is if any applications do not say running but say Not Responding. To manage these guys, right-click and choose end task. Give it a couple of seconds and follow the prompts. Important note: Forcing an application to shut down will lose data. If the program is not responding, you’ve most likely already lost the data. For example if its MS Word and you didn’t save the document as you progressed, then you have most likely lost that data. This important note applies to all steps in this tutorial. I recommend you read to the end before applying any particular steps. You will gain a better insight into the applications using up memory by jumping over to the Processes Tab. Here are three screenshots to help you understand the next few steps involved: In screen shot one – Processes Tab Highlighted – Click on the processes button. Then you will see something similar to the screen shot – Processes Tab. This has a wealth of information available to you. If you click on the names across the top, like CPU or Memory, you sort the list by whats using the most or least. So if if there is something hogging your system, clicking on CPU once or twice will list the worst offender. This list is everything running on your system. You see all sorts of programs have added unnecessary processes. Typical example – iTunesHelper and iPodhelper. Processes like these annoy me. OK, they are there so speed up the process and streamline plugging your iPod in and iTunes popping up and doing its thing. But I do that once every 6 months!!

Clicking on the Memory tab does something similar but is something you will understand better the more you use it. As highlighted in the third screenshot, Firefox and C hrome are being BOLD! I know from regularly checking this list that Firefox running with 342, 000 K of memory is too high. So this is my culprit in this case. I am using the new 3.6 Beta 3  version, which has bugs that is causing this problem.

Look at the list further, Chrome browser is listed several times. This is OK. But its using memory and a lot. I’ll close this program normally if, I don’t need it open.

Process Freezer

Remember the Important Note earlier? I said wait till the end of this post. You did wait, ya? I am going to now show you a safer way of dealing with offending processes. Forcing them to close is one thing,  but a company called Polaris Software have developed a piece of useful software called Process Freezer. It simply lists all your running processes and lets you highlight one and pause it. You will not lose data whilst it’s paused and may be just enough to get your system running fast enough to fix other problems. To quote their description:

Free Process Freezer is an easy to use free program for suspending (freezing) and resuming processes. It works similar to Windows Task Manager, but instead of terminating the process, the program allows you to suspend the problematic process and resume it later.

I recommend using this with Task Manager to re-gain control over your PCs performance. Download Process Freezer Here

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