You now find yourself presented with a long, and rather cryptic, list of processes. Some processes you may be able to readily decipher because they directly relate to a program that you are running at the time, such as
iexplore.exe (Internet Explorer),
WINWORD.exe (Microsoft Word), or
TASKMGR.exe (Task Manager),
notepad.exe (Notepad). However, other processes, such as
svchost.exe or
services.exe, are not as easy to identify.
Here is a list of processes in XP that are essential:
- taskmgr.exe
- explorer.exe
- svchost.exe
- spoolsv.exe
- lsass.exe
- services.exe
- winlogon.exe
- csrss.exe
- smss.exe
- System Idle Process
Likely you will have a few svchost.exe's running. Some of these are essential processes of Windows XP. Others can be shut down. But it's hard to tell.
task manager
