Process, Application, Task Manager and Computer Architecture Overview

Hello and welcome to basics of computer part2 , In previous post we have learned what is command prompt and how to use command prompt. So now you got a rough idea of how things work on your computer today let us know something more about how applications work and what a process mean in your computer and let us gain some more in depth of your computer performance and usage statistics.

APPLICATION :

An Application is a software package that is installed on your pc to do some of your tasks like suppose if you want to draw some rough sketches , you would open MSPAINT (just type ‘mspaint‘ in runbox) and draw something in it. Here MSPAINT is an application that you are using to do perform some task.

PROCESS :

As the definition of process itself says , Process is a series of activities of your way of doing it. Similarly here an application contains set of activities to perform which are linked to a single process. However a process may be divided into multiple threads thats however is not our concern to bother.

SERVICES :

Services is a long running process on your computer which performs certain activities which do not require user intervention. Like If you want to play music you will just click and play a song but for the system to play that song it requires audio service to be running. So Services are some sort of like this which can be run and stop on user selection and are loaded basically when the system boots up. You can find set of services running on your computer by typing ‘services.msc‘ on your computer or just by going to TaskManager which we will be covering soon.

NETWORKING :

Many of you have already know how popular internet is . Internet is all about Networking between computers. Computers are interconnected using different mediums like wired network medium or wireless network medium to exchange information between networked computers. You can see how internet works from the video link http://youtu.be/AG1fRYLybmU

These are just basic keywords that you need to know before we start discussing about how your computer works . Each and everything that you do is interpreted by computer as an even and acts accordingly as response for the event. Now even when you type something there is called ASCII Code concept by which your computer can recognize what you are typing and there is much more advanced concepts behind displaying the present screen that you are seeing. All of this what you have to know is computer is just a dumb machine where everything is interpreted as 0’s and 1’s and performs computing based on 0’s and 1’s it receives on each and every user action.

 

Computer ArchitectureYou might have already heard of the computer and its architecture for those who doesn’t then you can know it from above image , basically input and output devices are those which are used to give input to CPU or take output from CPU like keyboard , mouse and monitor. Control unit takes care of all these individual hardware units.

If you do some operation on computer then it requires some of CPU cycles to perform computing and get things done. Each and every task involves some CPU usage to compute the operations , so the term CPU usage or CPU performance indicates the amount of system resources allocated in performing tasks.

In windows an application can be created using softwares like Visual Studio , These softwares use the programming languages (like C# , VB…) to perform caluculations and invoke system calls called commands that we have learned in first part to integrate software with hardware usage .

Now if you got something from this then it is time for let us see these things in practical .

Open “Task Manager” , you can open this by typing run command “taskmgr” in runbox or by chosing task manager option on clicking Ctrl + Alt + Del.

Then following window should appear.

Task ManagerYou can see the tabs saying applications,processes, services, performance and networking these are all what we have discussed , you can observe all the applications and services that are running on your computer in processes tab and try right clicking on one of the processes and kill them and setting priority to the real time and observe how your pc is behaving and if you face any problem with your computer just restart it everything will be normal.

Thanks for reading hope you liked the article.