Task Manager lets you see which apps and services are running on your PC, as well as detailed information about services, user accounts, network connections and PC hardware. It also lets you control which apps start up automatically when you start Windows.
Open Task Manager by swiping in from the right edge of the screen, tapping Search (or if you're using a mouse, pointing to the upper-right corner of the screen, moving the mouse pointer down, and then clicking Search), entering Task Manager in the search box, tapping or clicking Apps, and then tapping or clicking Task Manager.
You can also open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc, or by right-clicking in the bottom-left corner of your screen and selecting Task Manager.
The first time you open Task Manager, you'll see the Fewer details view.
To close an app in this view, select the app, and then tap or click End task. You can also close an app from the Processes tab.
If you want to see more info on what your PC is doing, and more detail on the apps that are running, tap or click the More details button in the lower-left corner of Task Manager.
In this view, the first thing you'll see is a list of processes running on your PC.
You can see and manage each thing that's open in different apps. In each row, there is info about the resources that an app is using on your PC. The more an app is using of any resource, the stronger the colour is in Task Manager. This makes it easy to quickly find apps that are using a lot of resources.
The Start-up tab in Task Manager lets you view a list of apps that start automatically every time you turn on your PC and sign in to Windows.
If your PC is taking a long time to start up, one of the causes might be a large number of start-up apps, or a few apps that have a high impact on the start-up time. To disable an app from running when you start up your PC, tap or click the app, then tap or click Disable. You can always enable an app again later if you decide you want it to run at start-up.
The App history tab shows you how much data has been used by many of the apps on your PC. It includes data used by a metered Internet connection, such as 3G from a mobile operator. Because data on metered Internet connections sometimes leads to additional billing charges, you can use this tab to help keep track of how much data you've used.
You can view more details about what's running on your PC, how the hardware is running, and how much data is coming and going in different tabs. Some of this info is more technical and meant for advanced users.
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