How to Enable Disabled Windows Task Manager in Windows Vista
Written on by Kay
Task Manager is an important feature of any Operating system as it gives information about the various active processes, and programs at a particular moment. It also displays the general status of the computer and is very useful in debugging and termination of unresponsive programs or processes. Moreover, it can do many more tasks depending on the type of Operating system.
Windows is the most common Operating System, so the term ‘Task Manager’ often refers to the one used in Windows. It is present in Windows earlier versions (Win95, Win98 & WinMe)?termed the ‘simple Task Manager’ as it can only launch/terminate programs. The latest windows Vista has a more advanced offering including more information on computer resources (CPU, memory etc.) usage, networking (users, their activities etc.); services, processes. Like before, you can also set priorities or do forcible termination of processes, and shut down/log-off/ hibernate/restart Windows.
The Windows task manager can be accessed via keys combination of ‘Ctrl+Shift+Del’ or by right-clicking the taskbar menu.
At times, the task manager option is disabled (is grey) in the taskbar menu which can be due to virus/worms/ trojans/ spyware. Hence, as a precaution, you should scan the computer.
You can fix the same manually via the Registry. It is a windows database having the settings of the software and hardware installed in the windows versions (16-,32-,64-bit) and mobile too. If these settings are disturbed, the program/system can become unstable.
Hence, the manual fix is via the registry. You need to run ‘regedit.exe’ from the Start menu-Run option or search for the same (start search box). After that, search for the following key in the left pane of the registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
In the right pane, there is a ’32-bit REG_DWORD’ with the value (DisableTaskMgr) having one of the values 1-Disabled or 0-Enabled. You can change the value (double click on the value) or delete the key. Through this way. task manager can be enabled in Windows Vista.
Thank you so much for this information. The instructions were straight forward and easy to follow!
thanks very much this helped me out bigtime.
Very easy to follow for someone without any real computer training. Thank you very much!