Phil Bull philbull@gmail.com 2011 Michael Hill mdhillca@gmail.com 2011, 2014 Sort the list of processes by % CPU to see which application is using up the computer's resources. Which program is making the computer run slowly? Phil Bull

Explain how the System Monitor can be used to find misbehaving/resource-hogging processes. (A lot of process use 100% CPU or similar if they hang, for example.)

A program that is using more than its share of the CPU may slow down the whole computer. To find which process could be doing this:

Click the Processes tab.

Click the % CPU column header to sort the processes according to CPU use.

The arrow in the column header shows the sort direction; click again to reverse it. The arrow should point up.

The processes at the top of the list are using the highest percentage CPU. Once you identify which one might be using more resources than it should, you can decide whether to close the program itself, or close other programs to try to reduce the CPU load.

A process that has hung or crashed might use 100% CPU. If this happens you may need to kill the process.