How to tell what's running in the background on your PC?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
Let's get right into today's question.
"I'm not running anything at all, but my computer's working hard.
Why? Is there stuff running I can't see.
How do I tell?"
Well, yes, there's lots of stuff running. A Windows 10 machine in particular,
doing absolutely nothing, is doing an amazing amount of stuff.
It's truly incredible how many processes and how many different things are running
for a machine that is visibly doing nothing.
Let's have a look at a few of the places where you can tell with increasing levels
of detail what is and what isn't running on your machine.
So the place we're going to start is the task bar notification area.
That's this area down here in the lower
right hand corner of a normally positioned task bar.
You'll see that there are a few icons there.
But the very first icon that's listed is
this little upward facing carat or hat or whatever you want to call it.
If you see that, that means you're not seeing everything.
If you click on it, you'll actually end up
seeing more of the icons that would normally be displayed here.
I strongly recommend not letting the carat
character show, but instead going into task bar settings,
scrolling down, select which icons appear on the taskbar and then turning on.
Always show all icons in the notification area.
Now you can see that the icons are all visible. And they are a beginning
of showing you exactly what's running on your machine.
For example, in my case, from left to right, MalwareBytes is here.
Windows Defender or Microsoft Security is
running this icon that looks like a square or a cube with a little amber dot on it.
That's actually software that is associated with the virtual box
virtual machine software that I happen to be using.
And next over, of course, is Onedrive.
The other two icons indicate your
networking, your sound, and then of course, there's your time and date.
So there's a beginning.
There are some things that you can see
right off the bat and very quickly that are running now.
Let's fire up Task Manager.
We do that by right clicking on the clock and clicking task manager.
And you can see that, yes,
it's showing us Malwarebytes is running, but that's not enough.
What we really want is More Details.
And now all of a sudden you can see that there are a number of things running.
Malwarebytes, of course, is still listed.
The task manager itself is listed.
But now you can see that there's this long list of background processes.
These are all other things that are currently running on this machine.
And to be fair, this is actually a fairly it's not a particularly souped up machine.
I don't have a lot of software installed on this machine.
But this is a great example that just
shows you a beginning. The beginnings of what all is running on your machine when
you're doing nothing, as this machine seems to be.
But wait, there's more this display actually does a pretty good
job of showing you things in terms you are most likely to understand.
When we talk about Adobe Acrobat or the anti malware service executable,
that's Windows Defender, but it's anti malware.
You know what it is.
Cortana is here.
These are names that you recognize, including things like EaseUS ToDo.
I've got backup software installed,
but let's go over instead to the details tab this now.
And I'm going to make this window a little
bit bigger just so that we can see a little bit more of what's going on here.
These are the actual .exe files and dll's
that are running on your system that Windows thinks of as running programs.
And you can see there are a lot of them.
There are many of them.
I continue to scroll through here.
Service host is a special case.
We'll talk about that in just a minute.
But you can see that there are
a tremendous number of processes that are all running on your machine.
Again, when you believe that you are not
doing anything, your machine is definitely doing something.
Now, Service Host is a special case and you can
see that there are a lot of copies of service host running simultaneously.
Service host, as its name implies, is a host for services,
which is something that is on this tab over here labeled services.
This actually will show you a better description of exactly which services are
actually being run by all those svchost.exe's.
And you can see once again, these all have names and descriptions.
Some of which you may recognize and some
of which you may not all bordering on the very, very geeky.
Again, this is even more information than the previous tabs have shown you.
But now we go off where we're
going to get another program to do this for us.
So far, we've only used programs that are preinstalled in windows.
There's a program called Process Explorer that I really, really like.
So I'm going to fire up Edge
and go to what essentially boils down to my little shortcut here for go.askleo.com/procexp That will actually take us
to the Microsoft download page for something called Process Explorer.
We'll download it.
We can open that and it's a zip file that contains Procexp.
But now you can't run things directly from within a zip file.
So all we really need to do is drag
and drop these four files over to a folder that we actually can run things out of.
In this case, I'm going to copy these four files directly into the downloads folder.
So if we now go to downloads, we'll see that we not only have
the process explorer's zip file, including one that I had already
downloaded, but also the programs of the files within the zip file.
If I now double click on Procexp
the program runs. Since I've run this multiple times before
it bypassed a licensing page that you might see the very first time,
all you need to do is accept the terms of the license to continue.
This gives you way more information about
your system, about the software that's running on your system.
It's significantly more detailed.
And in fact, we can take a look at several of these.
Let's go and take a look at one drive if I right.
Click on Onedrive. You can see properties.
You can see where the program is, what parameters it was run with,
what the current directory is for that program, and a number of other
things, including its own performance graph.
You can see what that particular process
is doing in terms of IO, in terms of memory, in terms of CPU usage process.
Explorer gets used significantly more
information and significantly more geeky information, as I sometimes call it.
But it gives you
a better view of exactly everything that's running on your machine.
So, yes, when your machine is doing nothing, it's clearly doing a lot.
For links related to this video,
for updates, for demonstrations and more, visit askleo.com/32502.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.