When a Windows 11 system suddenly slows to a crawl, the graphical Task Manager is usually the first tool administrators reach for. However, if the system is severely memory-starved, launching a heavy graphical application like Task Manager can actually freeze the computer entirely. For immediate, lightweight diagnostics, PowerShell provides the Get-Process cmdlet. This command allows you to view, sort, and terminate resource-hogging applications instantly using minimal system overhead.
Basic Process Viewing
The Get-Process cmdlet is built natively into PowerShell and requires no special installation.
- Click the Windows 11 Start Menu.
- Type PowerShell into the search bar and press Enter.
- In the blue console window, simply type:
Get-Process
Press Enter. PowerShell will output a table of every active process running on your machine. The most critical column for memory diagnostics is WS(K), which stands for Working Set. This represents the amount of physical RAM (in kilobytes) currently allocated to the process.
Sorting Processes by Memory Usage
Viewing a raw list of hundreds of background services is overwhelming. To find the culprit causing your system slowdown, you need to sort the output so the applications consuming the most RAM appear at the bottom of the list (closest to your prompt).
To sort the list by Working Set in ascending order, pipe the output into the Sort-Object cmdlet:
Get-Process | Sort-Object WS
If you prefer to see the biggest memory hogs at the very top of the list, you can reverse the sort using the -Descending flag:
Get-Process | Sort-Object WS -Descending
Filtering for Specific Applications
If you suspect a specific application is causing a memory leak (for example, Google Chrome), you do not need to generate the entire list. You can ask PowerShell to retrieve the memory usage for a specific process name by using the -Name parameter.
Get-Process -Name chrome
This will output a concise table showing only the active Chrome processes, allowing you to instantly see their combined memory footprint.
Killing a High Memory Process
Once you have identified an application that is consuming an unacceptable amount of RAM, you can terminate it directly from the same PowerShell window without ever opening Task Manager. You simply pipe the output of your targeted Get-Process command directly into the Stop-Process cmdlet.
For example, if you identified a process named badapp consuming 8GB of memory, you can forcefully kill it by running:
Get-Process -Name badapp | Stop-Process -Force
The application will be instantly terminated, and the physical RAM will be immediately released back to the operating system.