There are just days when your computer comes to a crawl and you have no idea what’s going on. Actually, you can take a peek and see which of your application is eating up a lot of memory and CPU usage.

To do this press CTRL + ALT + DELETE in sequence make sure you don’t release any of the key until you see this window pop out:

You’ll see the Windows Task Manager, from this application you can actually do a lot:

1. Kill applications that hang-up or is just eating too much CPU cycle.
2. See how much CPU cycle is your system eating, if it reaches 100% expect your system to be rather hot.
3. See how much memory an application is using.
4. View a graphical representation of your CPU and network activity.
5. See users that are logged on (only true when you have a couple of profiles in your computer).
6. Shutdown, reboot or log-off from your computer.
7. View all the running applications on your profile and other profiles (if its currently logged on and you have switched to the current profile).

Its pretty handy actually and its something I use on a daily basis. To view how much CPU cycle is an application using click on the Process tab and then click on the CPU column twice until you see the high numbers of the CPU column at the top.

For this demonstration what you see on my system is that 98% of the CPU is idle and 2% is being used by firefox. exe (which is actually the Firefox browser). There’s a catch to this though, you need to know the exact Image Name of the application that you are looking for (the actual executable).

Actual image names don’t always match to the application’s title, like the World of Warcraft game, the actual image name that shows up on Windows Task Manager is wow.exe. ^_^

If you share your computer at your house and sometimes just sometimes, your brother barges in and begs to log-in to his profile to check his mail for just 5 minutes and you are in the middle of your work with about 27 programs open.

What do you do? Easy you just click on the Start button hit Log Off, then click on the Switch User button.

Now that is if you have fast switching enabled (which is by the way enabled by default). Now what if when you click the Log Off button and instead of seeing the option above you see this.

Click Log Off and you lose all your work, not a very good idea. This also means one thing. Fast user switching has been disabled. A program can disable it or somebody with administrative rights has disabled it, but regardless of reason  you need to enable it so that you don’t have to close all your applications just to open another profile.

To enable fast user switching:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.

2. Look for an icon named User Accounts and open the application.

3. On the User Accounts window click on the Change the way users log on or off link.

4. On the next window make sure both of these options are checked. Use the Welcome screen and Use Fast User Switching.

5. Click apply and you are done. When you click on the Log Off button again you should see the Switch User button.

Oh and a tip, by using shortcut keys you can instantaneously switch to the Welcome screen. To do this press the Window key and the letter L simultaneously (make sure that you press the window key first).

Almost immediately you will be switched to the Welcome screen. One last note, if you are a bit short on memory (say your system only has 512 MB which kinda sucks), switching back and forth between profiles may take a long time. Even if it were me though, I’d rather switch slow than have to start all over again after I log off my profile. ^_^

This is a guide to show you how to uninstall a program in Windows XP. To most of you who thinks this is a no-brainer, you can skip this post, but for those who are about to make their first program uninstall, you are definitely in the right place.

Let’s uninstall:

1. Begin by clicking on the Windows Start button on the taskbar.

2. Then click on the Control Panel icon.

3. When a window opens look for an icon titled Add or Remove Programs. Open the icon by double clicking on it or clicking on it once and then pressing the Enter key.

4. A window then will be displayed with the list of programs that has been installed on your system. Just for this exercise I’ll be uninstalling the software named Spb Screenshot.

5. When you click on the program you wish to remove you should see a Remove button on the right side of the column. Click on the remove button and follow the prompts/instructions.

Then you are done! Depending on the software installed, it may prompt that it has been uninstalled (sometimes it doesn’t) and sometimes it may require you to reboot. After the uninstall process, you should not see the program anymore listed in the Add Remove Programs window.

Just a warning, removing programs is pretty much routine but may have some adverse effect on your system if you uninstalled the wrong software (ie. uninstalling your sound driver by accident therefore losing audio). Please take precaution and READ instructions presented in each prompt.

I made this guide as comprehensive as possible, but I take no liability in case something bad happens to your system. You are responsible for your actions. Hope this helps. ^_^