How to identify an elevated process in Windows 10

There are many processes running in your Windows operating system. These background processes can use different accounts to operate. Some processes may operate under system accounts while others may operate under user accounts. When a process operate under user account, it can be either be elevated or non-elevated. An elevated process runs with administrative privileges. While a non-elevated process can run under standard account, which has no admin rights. In this article, we will see how to identify an elevated process in Windows 10.

System administrators may sometimes need to identify elevated processes to troubleshoot the system. An elevated process usually runs with higher privileges. But Windows does not display elevated processes natively. To identify an elevated process, you can make use of Task Manager. However, even Task Manager natively does not show running elevated processes. But the good thing is that you can configure some of its settings to display elevated processes. Here is how you can do that.

How to identify an elevated process in Windows 10

1. Open Task Manager.

2. Now go to the Details tab. Right click on a column, such as Name, PID, Status etc. and click Select columns.

3. In the Select columns window, scroll down and locate Elevated option. Once you find it, check it and click OK.

4. You should be then able to locate elevated processes in the Task Manager as there should have been introduced Elevated column now. Refer to the below mentioned screenshot. In this screenshot, I have clearly highlighted elevated process running under system account. I have also highlighted an elevated process running under administrator account. To keep it simple, if an elevated process is running, you’ll find Yes under Elevated column here. If you process is non-elevated, it should have a No in Elevated column.

So this is how you can identify elevated processes in Windows 10.

Hope you found the article useful!