Is your PC game chugging in Windows 10? Xbox Game Bar makes it easy to free up system resources

Xbox Game Bar
(Image credit: Microsoft)

The Xbox Game Bar for Windows 10 is about to get a bit more useful, as testing has begun on a fresh addition in the form of a new Task Manager widget. It allows users to pull up the Task Manager from directly within the Game Bar and interact with it without having to leave the game they’re playing.

This means in scenarios where you fire up a game for a quick session, and find that it’s performing more sluggishly than normal, if you want to check what else might be running in the background with Windows 10 – perhaps an app you’d forgotten about sapping a chunk of your RAM or CPU power – you can check right there and then with the Game Bar widget.

As opposed to having to drop back to the desktop to view the Task Manager, which is obviously less convenient.

Streamlined widget

This feature is still in testing, as mentioned, and it’s a streamlined version of the Task Manager, but the widget gives you all the important details in terms of CPU, GPU, Disk and RAM usage, as well as the ability to quickly close any apps which are hogging too much in the way of resources.

The widget also provides an at-a-glance visual indicator which shows green, yellow or red for each entry, so you can quickly spot the red warnings for any problematic processes.

Hopefully the Task Manager widget will move past testing and be rolled out to the general computing public before too long.

Microsoft is on a bit of a drive to make the Xbox Game Bar more useful to encourage adoption of the feature, bringing in support for third-party widgets back in June (for example, there’s a Razer Cortex widget which facilitates quick access to its game boosting capability, among other bits and pieces).

Via Windows Central

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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