I have windows xp. How do i find what programs are running in the background?

My conputer is running very slow and having difficulty connecting to the internet, I have high speed cable..and it used to almost instantly go from one site to another, now it takes over three minutes to go from my profile on myspace to home. It's slow opening yahoo mail too.

Number 2 & 3 are correct. What the process does is show you all the programs currently "active" or rather awake. You can click and end each one not being "used" and it may help.

I'm extremely remedial when it comes to a comp, but I know all I wanna know. The "system" files, which eat tons of memory, are always present. Files for programs such as AOL use huge amounts of memory just to have you connected.

Certainly without knowing your processor speed or RAM, it's not possible to be more specific than do a Defrag, save files in the hard drive to disk, check for history, cookies, temp files, and do a clean up, etc.

Steven Wolf

screw windows I switched to a linux OS called freespire and I will never go back to the crooks at microsoft and if you dont like that one there are dozens of others mandrake pclinux knoppix red hat the list goes on and one and did I mention they cost pennies when compared to windows

If you downloaded the free version of limewire or bearshare, they open a ton of background programs. I believe that you have to boot your computer into safe mode to delete them, andy way I was explained what to do but can't remember. Also if you have aol get rid of it (but you shouldn't have it because you're on yahoo)

Hmmm.. A computer shouldn't run that slow.

Maybe you're viruses galore right now.

Press ctrl + alt + delte

your background tasks will show.

ever tried defragmenting your computer? hehe

or, if you're in asia, the earthquake in taiwan disrupted internet communications.

Defrag, cleanup, scandisk. And sometimes it is just a simple thing like rebooting. My internet connection seems like it slower over the course of the day. It may be just traffic, but just restarting sometimes is all that it takes.

Also run your virus scan, make sure your firewall is up, check for spyware.

And I recently installed WinPatrol. It tells you everything that is running in the background. There is a free version or full version, think it was about $30. Yeah, here:

http://www.winpatrol.com/

Highly recommended

Edit: another thing is old software. If you upgraded to XP, some of older software doesn't run as well. I have an old version Photoshop, and when I upgraded to XP on my desktop, it doesn't run as well. It doesn't run right on my laptop, either. I'm just too cheap to upgrade Photoshop, haha. But you may want to upgrade you internet brower, especially if you upgraded you operating system. And yeah AOL software is horrible. Get rid of it, it is just taking up space.

Press ctrl,alt,delete,it will bring up the task manager.

I agree with the people about spyware, I use Spysweeper. Easy to use and works great.

by doing ctrl -alt -del only tells you what's running now, but stop it.
imaging you have to stop the jobs every time windows starts, you have to use ctrl -alt -del every time you start window.

1. the effective way is to click "start", highlight "run"
then type "msconfig", under start up, un check all the software you don't want them to run when window starts.

2. scheduled virus checking scan and spyware scan and defragmenting are also help ful.

3. get rid of all the software you don't need by going control panel and add remove softwares

4. delete all the temp files include all the internet temp files since you don't use them any ways

5. clear your massy desktop

Ctrl - Alt- Del at the same time. If it's slow it either needs defragging or my bet is, it has a bunch of spyware on it that is bogging it down.
Type in Free MSN Spyware finder to your browser and download their version. It will find and quarantine all spyware, allowing your computer to run a lot faster.
Then do the same thing with the Spyware finder once per week.