Microsoft® Windows® XP Unleashed

Managing Applications Using the Task Manager

One of the main complaints of Windows users in the past few years is that Windows 95/98/Me applications sometimes tend to hang or freeze, requiring a system reboot. The Windows XP architecture should go far toward eliminating that problem. As you learned in Chapter 1, “Looking Inside Windows XP Professional,” each process that runs under Windows XP has its own separate virtual address space. With the virtual memory management keeping track of all the page tables, pointers, and so on, there should never be a reason for you to reboot the computer to get rid of an application that isn't working as it should.

If an application hangs up in Windows XP, you can open the Task Manager in one of two ways: