What can I do to close apps that are eating up resources that are running in the background?

I am on Windows 10 and I have a laptop from 2015 that I use to play games. I want as much performance as I can get but I have recently noticed that my CPU and disk usage are both high. I looked in the task manager and found out that there are a lot of programs in the background running and I want to close them but I don’t want to screw up my computer. What can I use to close unnecessary programs that are eating up recourses and also get rid of them?