Get more information on the programs that run on your computer with Task Manager

There are a lot of third party task managers for Windows XP that are better than the built in one, and people that want to know all about the processes running on their computer must get one... or jump to Google and try to find out more about what's loaded in their computer's memory.

Since I guess that you have Vista already, there's no need to use any additional tools for getting such information, so here's a quick overview of the Windows Vista task manager's goodies...

• Open the task manager using the new keyboard shortcut, CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. Alternatively, you can type taskmgr in the search bar, and then press Enter.
• Open the Process tab
• You can notice the detailed, plain-English descriptions available for almost every entry in the list

• If you need to jump to the file's location on the hard drive, just right click and choose Open File Location.
• Another useful feature of the right click menu is called Set Affinity. If you have a dual core or dual CPU system, this can help performance by binding a CPU-intensive process to a specific processor. That's how you avoid the "each processor is at 50% load" phenomenon. Some tasks can benefit slightly when they are stuck to a particular CPU
• At last, if you want to customize the task manager, feel free to click View - Select Columns and pick your needed information from more than two dozen available choices.