If you're doing any type of troubleshooting in Windows, then you've probably used Task Manager before. This is a realtime view of some of the most important statistics that will help you understand how the Windows operating system may be performing. There are a number of ways to start Task Manager. One of the easiest is to press Ctrl Altdelete and select the option for task manager. You could also right mouse click in the taskbar of Windows and select the option for task manager or use my favorite shortcut which is control shift escape and task manager will instantly appear. Once you start task manager, you'll find a number of different tabs across the top that will choose different statistics in different parts of the Windows operating system. We'll start with the services tab. This can of course be also accessed from the control panel, but this will show you all of the services running on your system all from the task manager front end. This is a very easy way to access this list of services. And from here, we can start, stop, or restart any of the services running in our Windows system. The services tab is usually at the end of the list of task manager tabs. And you can see all of the services running on this computer are listed. You can right mouse click on any of these services to start, stop, or restart the service. And you can launch the services applet, which provides you with even more options. When you first log into Windows, you'll notice a lot of different applications will automatically start during that boot process. You can manage this list of applications from the startup tab of Task Manager. When you're troubleshooting a problem during startup, you may want to disable one or all of these different startup applications to see if you can resolve this particular issue. Then you might want to turn them on one by one or in different groups, restart your system, and see if you're able to pinpoint where the problem might be occurring. And that way, you're able to disable that particular application during the startup process. Here's the startup tab in Task Manager on my computer. There aren't a lot of applications listed here, but I can right mouse click on any of them to enable or disable that application during startup. If you want to view all of the running applications on your Windows computer right now, you can see them all inside of your task manager under the processes tab. From here, you have a single view of all of the applications that are currently running on the Windows desktop and you can view the background processes that are currently in use. The default view is to see the CPU usage, memory, disk, network, GPU, and other metrics. But you can also rearrange these columns, sort by different information in these columns. And if you right mouse click, you can add additional metrics to this view. This is a great summary of everything that's running on your system. And being able to sort these different columns allows you to easily pinpoint what application might be using the most amount of memory or the one that's using the most amount of network resources. When you first start the troubleshooting process, you may want to get an idea of just how much CPU utilization is currently in use, or you might want to see how much memory is being utilized. You can see all of these from the performance tab in a graphical format that shows you information over the last 60 seconds. This historical view allows you to get a feel for how different applications may be using the hardware resources of your computer. And from here, you can start troubleshooting if your problem might be associated with CPU usage or if your problem is related to memory or network. Depending on the configuration of your computer, you might have different metrics listed along the left side. On my computer, I can see CPU utilization, memory usage, disk usage, network configurations, and on my particular system, I can also see my graphical processing unit. And of course, Windows is a multi-user operating system. Not only can multiple people log in to your local computer, you can have people connecting across the network to different resources that are on your local computer. So although you may be the only one sitting at your desk, there may be tens or hundreds of people that are accessing resources on your computer across the network. You'll be able to see all of these users who are connected through the users tab in task manager. You'll be able to see exactly who's connected and then you'll be able to see what applications or what resources they may be accessing. And since this is your computer, you also have control over who may access. And from this view of task manager, you can choose to disconnect a user if you'd like to remove their access from the system.