The Horror of Task Manager: 5 apps quietly eating away at your PC.
You launch a game, join a server, and suddenly realise something’s wrong. The crosshairs are laggy, the frame rate is all over the place, and instead of smooth gameplay, you’re stuck with a slideshow. You open the Task Manager and see that, even though the game is barely running, your 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM is almost completely full.
Who’s behind this crime? Usually not the game itself, but a small army of ‘innocent’ programmes running in the background, which – with or without your knowledge – are feasting on your computer’s resources.
1. Google Chrome and co: Endless tabs.
Browsers based on the Chromium engine (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave) are absolute record-breakers when it comes to consuming resources.
How it works: Modern browsers isolate every open tab and extension as a completely separate system process.
The effect in-game: A guide open on Reddit, an interactive in-game map, a YouTube playlist playing in the background – and suddenly the browser itself is gobbling up between 2 and 4 GB of RAM.
The silent saboteur: Hardware acceleration. This feature, enabled by default, means the browser not only steals RAM but also valuable cycles from your graphics card, which should be rendering your game at the same time.
2. Discord: A hidden browser disguised as a messaging app.
Discord looks like a lightweight programme for chatting with friends, but beneath the surface lies an application built on the Electron platform. In practice, this means that when you launch Discord, you’re actually running… yet another instance of the Chromium browser.
Resource overhead: Constantly refreshing animated emojis, streaming GIF avatars and buffering voice chats constantly drains RAM and CPU threads.
The silent saboteur: Game Overlay. Injecting Discord’s transparent interface directly into the rendering window is one of the most common causes of sudden frame time spikes and micro-stutters during fast-paced battles.
3. The Battle of the Launchers: A party in the system tray.
The days when games were launched from a single shortcut on the desktop are long gone. Today, the average gamer has the following applications installed simultaneously: Steam, Epic Games Launcher, EA App, Ubisoft Connect, Battle.net and Riot Client.
How it works: Most launchers start up by default alongside Windows and minimise to the system tray.
Hardware overhead: Each of them maintains a constant network connection, checks for updates in the background and refreshes animated shop banners using web technology.
The silent saboteur: Launching a game on Steam doesn’t put the other clients to sleep at all. Before you even join a server, three unused launchers can collectively consume over 1.5 GB of RAM simply by sitting idle in the background.
4. RGB software: The most expensive rainbow of your life.
This is the most absurd category of software performance hogs. Programmes for controlling lighting and macros (e.g. Razer Synapse, Corsair iCUE, ASUS Armoury Crate):
They can run between 8 and over a dozen independent background processes.
They constantly poll the CPU bus with hardware interrupts just to check whether the LED on the mouse should change colour from purple to blue.
They consume several hundred megabytes of RAM and steal valuable cycles from the processor’s L3 cache, worsening the 1% Low FPS metric.
5. Windows telemetry and overzealous antivirus programmes.
Windows has a built-in task scheduler which, at random moments, may decide that the middle of your ranked match is the perfect time to:
Generate telemetry reports and send diagnostic logs.
Running a drive scan to check for changes to temporary files.
Dynamically compressing RAM, which pushes the processor clock speeds to the limit on the desktop.
How can you stop this chaos without manually closing 20 or more processes?
The traditional method involves laboriously clicking through the Task Manager: killing individual Chrome processes, closing Discord, shutting down launchers, and restarting it all once the game is over. In practice, nobody has the time or inclination for that.
Instead of manually fighting a losing battle, it’s much simpler to hand control over to the SmoothWizard tool:
Automatic suspension of background applications (Suspend List): In the PRO module, the programme detects when a game is launched and automatically freezes designated background programmes (launchers, browsers). They then use 0% of the CPU, GPU and disk, and upon exiting the game, they immediately return to their normal state without losing any open tabs or documents.
Swapfile-based memory optimisation: Instead of force-closing applications, SmoothWizard safely frees up RAM by moving inactive data to the hard drive. The game immediately gains free RAM buffer space for textures and models.
CPU core isolation (CPU Affinity): The programme automatically closes background processes running on spare threads, ensuring that the main game engine has exclusive use of the fastest physical core.
Instant Process Killer: If an application freezes and stops responding, the module built into the control panel allows you to terminate it immediately with a single click.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
Does disabling hardware acceleration in the browser and Discord always help?
Whilst gaming, yes, as this reduces the load on the graphics processing unit (GPU) and eliminates frame buffer overlap. However, if you use your computer exclusively for office work, acceleration speeds up page rendering.
How much RAM can you free up by closing background applications?
In a typical scenario (a browser with several tabs, a messaging app, two launchers and an RGB controller), closing or freezing these processes frees up between 2.5 and even 5 GB of physical memory, which immediately results in a more stable frame rendering time (frame time).
