Behind the Scenes of Your Computer: The Truth About Background Processes
Have you ever wondered what your computer is doing while you’re not clicking anything? It’s almost always still busy with background processes. Background processes are tasks that your computer runs behind the scenes while you’re using other programs. I’m going to explain today what background processes are, what they do, what they look like, and why we need them.
Why Do Background Processes Exist
You see the “front end” of the apps you use. However, a lot is going on under the hood. Background processes keep your system running smoothly with updates, security checks, and driver checks. They provide support for active apps, like playing music while browsing, and syncing your cloud files. Some of the background processes facilitate communication with hardware, like printers, Wi-Fi transfers, and Bluetooth communications.
Examples of Background Processes
If you have antivirus or other security software, it often has some processes that run in the background, proactively preventing hazardous actions. That’s how it can block a suspicious download or prevent an app from accessing a protected file location. Cloud storage sync actions run in the background as well – like Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud. Additionally, your email and chat apps are constantly active in the background, checking for new messages
The most important background processes are for the operating system: the update checker, time synchronization, backups, and power management, to name just a few. Many of these processes provide stability and performance enhancements, but many others are critical for security. The event logging function is vital for performance, troubleshooting, and security.
How to See Background Processes
If they’re running in the background, how do we know they’re running? We have tools in Windows, Mac, and Linux that let us view what processes are active. There are also things you can do to look at the background processes on your tablets and phones. Let’s dig in.
Windows
Use the Windows Task Manager on Windows 10 and Windows 11 to find your background processes.
The top of the window shows the “active” processes, your open apps. The bottom half, though, is where you’ll find all your background processes. This is often where you can see your security software running a system scan, and that can be why all of a sudden everything ground to a crawl. You get to the Task Manager by right-clicking in a space in your taskbar and selecting Task Manager. Scroll down past the active items to the processes.
MacOS
If you use a Mac (a computer, not a tablet or phone), click on the icon that looks like this:
That will bring up the Activity Monitor, and you’ll see the apps and processes that are consuming resources. The top row looks like this:
Linux
Linux systems accomplish the same thing by using the System Monitor. To open it, you’ll open the start menu and type System Monitor. This is what the System Monitor’s column headers look like.
Phones and Tablets
Because of the way phones and tablets execute their processes, you won’t see it all displayed like you would on a computer. On an Android device, use Settings > Apps > Running Services to see the active apps and system services. iPhones sandbox their processes, so you won’t see a live “task manager” list, there are two helpful places to see what uses resources. One is Settings > Battery > Last 24 hours, where you can see which apps ran in the background and for how long. Another one is Settings > General > Background App Refresh, which lets you see and control which apps are allowed to update in the background.
In short, Android hides most of the system-level stuff so that you can’t easily break something important. iPhones and iPads handle most background tasks automatically by freezing most apps that aren’t in active use. Certain ones get to keep working without having to be the active window, like music, GPS, and messaging apps.
When Are Background Processes a Problem?
Most of the time, we don’t really even have to think about background processes. However, there are a few things that warrant our attention. If some of the processes forget to terminate themselves, you could end up with too many of them running at once, which can slow down the computer. Some malware can disguise itself as a background process, to avoid detection by security software. The heavy resource use can also cause a drain on your battery. I can’t give you all the cures for it in this piece, but if you notice that your computer or device has become inordinately slow, loses a charge quickly, and gets unusually hot (all at the same time), you will want to look into getting it scanned for malware. Often, however, a reboot will terminate misbehaving processes. If you don’t know what a process is, don’t just jump into terminating it.
Tips to Keep Background Processes Under Control
Now that we know what background processes should and shouldn’t be doing, let’s take a look at how we can ensure good behavior from them. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but keep apps and programs updated. That practice is like a preventive tonic against a lot of problems.
Another helpful action is to uninstall programs you don’t use. That’s good advice anyway, because software is doing more with every iteration, which can only happen with more code. As a result, the programs themselves are getting bigger, taking up more hard drive space. Good management of installed programs will keep them from spawning unnecessary background processes as well as preserving precious hard drive real estate.
It can also be helpful to check to see what’s starting up with every restart or fresh start. You may be surprised to find that you don’t really need some programs to be at-the-ready every time. Each operating system has its own way to check this, so search for “how do I control which apps start automatically,” and follow the instructions. Developers want you to use their programs, and they want to make it easy to use them. It’s really only a couple of clicks to manually start them.
Your Turn
You don’t need to be a computer expert to manage background processes wisely, you just need to know what to look for and where to look. Take a look at the background processes running on your computer – was there anything there that surprised you?
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