Though it may sound unnecessary, it is indeed important at times to know what's running on your PC. The importance of this is two fold. One to maximize resource utlization (of your PC) and second to ensure safety of information in your PC.

There are number of ways to find out what is running in your PC. To make it simple for a general computer user, the guidelines below should help:

1) Once you are on your desktop (assuming you are using Windows OS), you should see the "Start" menu at the bottom left corner of your screen and alongside a taskbar which shows you all the open applications (if any). To the extreme right hand of your screen at the bottom is the Task Tray (or System Tray). This is the area that you should be more interested in. This area actually shows you some of the programs that are running though not visible apparently. However all that you see here is not suspicious. Most icons here should be familiar to you. Like the Network Connection Icon, your IM Icons (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk etc.). You could float your mouse over the icons to see what they are if you are not familiar with any.

Now that you have seen what is apparently running in the system, you will need to delve a little deep to see the applications that have not yet shown their identity. To do this, you could use the keyboard and press CTRL+ALT+DEL and then click on the 'Task Manager" button. (I prefer it this way) or click on Start, then on Run and type in "taskmgr" (case is not important). You should then see the "Windows Task Manger" window on your screen with lot of things happening. On the top you will find Four Tabs, namely Applications, Processes, Performance and Networking. We will restrict our attention to "Processes". Click on the "Processes" tab and you will find a list of application names on the left, with the username next (the user who started this application), then the CPU column (which shows how much processor time is being used by the application) and last the Mem Usage (showing how much memory the application is using). Now click on the column "Image Name" to sort the list of application in alphabetical order.

Now comes the critical part. Most of the stuff that you see here should be difficult to identify for a lame person. However we again have a quick solution. First do not consider any application that has "SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE or NETWORK SERVICE" as the username. All these applications are used by the Operating System and can ideally be ignored.

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