How do I interpret the Processes tab in Task Manager?
The processes tab in Task Manager has one row per process executing on the system, and a number of columns showing information about the process. You can configure which columns are displayed (View->Select Columns), and rearrange their order by dragging the column headers in the usual way. On XP, you can decide whether to show other user’s processes or just your own. The ‘image name’ is the name of the executable file used when the process was created; this name is popularly referred to as the name of the process, though it’s not really. (Why ‘image’? Because programmers used the word ‘image’ for ‘memory image file’ long before it was possible to put pictures on a computer without a defense-department-sized budget). There are two exceptions to this, the System Idle Process (pid 0) and the System process (pid 4). These are wired into the kernel, and do not have corresponding image files. They don’t have image names either, so various tools such as Task Manager make up names, so you migh
