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How to find out what's running on your PC (and why this is important)

With the world shrinking to one click of a PC, it is really important to see what's running on your PC. This is highly important from both human and technical perspective.

From human perspective, this is important as people now use PC more frequently for their personal works like online money. Your personal work on PC makes it important to continuously monitor your system along with a stress on safety and security. Monitoring your PC is also important from technical perspective as you don't want to see your PC dying too young or getting older with slower performances.


To keep your PC young, safe and sound, you must be constantly aware of what's running on your PC and do regular health checks of your PC. There are multiple ways to see what's running on your PC. One way could be as simple as choosing View currently running program' option under Control Panel-> Programs -> Window Defender on Windows Vista or following could be other ways irrespective of whether you have Windows Vista or not.

The first and simplest way is "Task Manager". Task manager tells most of the story. It tells what all programs, processes and services are running on your PC. It also shows all the networks your PC is connected to and users logged on to your PC.

The first thing to check on Task manager is Applications' tab. This tab shows all applications running on your PC at the very moment. All the application looks ok to you but you still suspect something wrong with your PC? Check the Processes' tab and 'Services' tab. Read their descriptions, ideally you should be able to make a judicious guess. In case of doubt you can always check the running process's credibility on internet sites like http://www.processlibrary.com/ and others. These sites can evaluate the process or service for you and state risk pertaining to them.

You can always check to which application a specific process or service belongs. Doing a right click on an application and selecting 'go to processes' will highlight processes associated with this application. Do the same on a process (right click - going to services) to see all the services associated with this process. This gives full mapping of an application to services through processes.

You can also check other tabs in "Task Manager". 'Networks' tab shows all the networks your PC is connected to. Users' tab, to see who else apart from you, is logged on to your system and using it. If everything looks ok then be assured what running on


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