{"id":97606,"date":"2017-12-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-19T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=97606"},"modified":"2019-03-13T01:21:12","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T08:21:12","slug":"20171219-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20171219-00\/?p=97606","title":{"rendered":"How does Task Manager categorize processes as App, Background Process, or Windows Process?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When you go to the Processes tab in Task Manager, you see the processes grouped into three categories: App, Background Process, and Windows Process. How does it decide which process goes into which category? <\/p>\n<p>These are terms that Task Manager simply made up. The system itself doesn&#8217;t really care what kind of processes they are. <\/p>\n<p>If the process has a visible window, then Task Manager calls it an &#8220;App&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>If the process is <a HREF=\"https:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/windows\/desktop\/dn386160(v=vs.85).aspx\">marked as critical<\/a>, then Task Manager calls it a &#8220;Windows Process&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, Task Manager calls it a &#8220;Background Process&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s all. Nothing fancy. And completely arbitrary. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a made-up term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-97606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>It&#8217;s a made-up term.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}