I have a problem with my task manager. If I were to press Ctr+Alt+Del and press the option for the task manager, the task manager does not come up. Instead I am given an error message which says that the Task Manager has been disabled by my administrator.

Fair enough, but I AM the computers administrator, why am I getting this message?

Can anyone help?

There is a slight possibility you have a virus as disabling the registry editor, cli and the task manager is a common sign, however it might be something as simple as the permissions. Are you actually THE administrator, or using an account that is in the administrators group? If you don't know what I mean by that, ask.

If you are interested there is a far better task manager available called Process Explorer and is written by SysInternals. Microsoft liked their product so much, they bought the company and you can now get a free version from here..

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb896653.aspx

The nice thing about PE is that it has an option to integrate into the system, so pressing [ctrl]+[alt]+[del] brings it up instead. SysInternals did lot's of really useful little windows tools, a list of them can be found here..

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...7c5a693683.aspx

To any techies, I recommend Process Monitor, File Monitor and Registry Monitor. Really detailed, dead easy to use and possibly the saviour from 5 hours of hard work trying to figure out where something is going wrong.

I'm the only administartor, there only is one account (mine) on the laptop. Virus scans have revealed nothing,so I'm not sure whats causing it.

I'll download the Process Explorer and give that a try, cheers Ric.

What OS are you using? As you will have an administrator account, even if you only see your named account when logging on. For example, look at the difference between going to the User Accounts dialog in the Control Panel to the actual user accounts accessed through the Computer Management dialog.



Spot how the User Accounts only shows my named account (the one I used at the very end of the OS setup) and the guest account (disabled) while there are several more security accounts. It is the permissions of these that allow you to run applications (inc. the task manager) on your PC.

I log into the PC with my Ric account, which itself is in the group "administrators". If you right click the name of your login account on the right hand panel in the Computer Management dialog you will get another dialog shown, click the Members Of tab of that dialog and you should see something like..

I'm using Vista. Where do I find this Computer Management folder about? sorry if thats sounds like a stupid question, but I'm not very good with the technical side of computers.

No that's Ok. It isn't difficult or at least it shouldn't be..


In XP you simply need to right click over My Computer (whether that is in the start menu or on the desktop it doesn't matter). One of the options will be Manage. I've not needed to find it on Vista to be fair so I don't know if it's hidden.

The Vista equivelance is simply "Computer" and can be found on the start menu.

Jay, you are a bit of a coder, you should check out that list of SysInternals tools (if you don't have them already).

Already have a lot of the stuff on that Technet site. I discovered it a while back when trying to come up with a method of enforcing the logon hours placed on accounts within AD. PSShutdown (I think it's been bundled with a whole lot of stuff into PSTools IIRC) allows me to schedule a batch file on the server that can give everyone a 5 minute shutdown warning. I was popular when that first happened!

SysInternals stuff is generally invaluable to any network admins, I'd recommend it to anyone!