In every windows system there are many processes running in the background. Some are operating system’s processes that are required for windows to operate, some are processes that still belong to the OS but are not necessary, and some are processes that belong to other applications running on your machine, such as Anti-Virus, Firewall. Of course regular applications you run such as Browser, Office, Email application, Instant Messenger are also processes. But some processes running silently can be spyware, Trojans horses and other Malware.

In order to take control over the processes running on your machine, you need to see what is running, know what every process is, have the ability to close it and remove it from even being started.

The easiest way to see what processes are running on your machine is thru the Task Manager, which comes standard with every Windows. Just press Ctrl+Shift+Esc and the Task Manager will popup.

The Task Manager contains 3 tabs. The first is the Application Tab, which shows you the applications running on your machine, which are in the task bar. The application tab will not show you the applications running in the system tray nor the background processes running. In order to see them you’ll need to go (not surprisingly) to the Processes tab.

The processes tab shows you information about the applications and the background processes running on your machine. Unfortunately the information provided by the Task Manager is very limited. For instance you’ll see a process called SVCHOST.EXE, how do you know if this is a legitimate process or maybe it is a spyware?

In order to find more information about these obscure names we can turn to the web to find more information. Of course you can always use Google but there are two sites I would like to mention that contain a large database of information about processes you might find running on your machine. The first one is http://www.processlibrary.com/ and the second one I’d recommend is http://startup.iamnotageek.com/ . Both sites contain very good information about a process. Just run a query on the process name and you’ll find out whether it is a legitimate service or not.

Now that have that information we can decide what to do. If it is a Malware, you might want to try an Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware application to remove it. On the other hand if you find a legitimate service that is not necessary you might want stop that service from running at startup and by doing that improving your computer performance.