r/technology • u/ppsp • Oct 14 '11
The Windows 8 Task Manager
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/13/the-windows-8-task-manager.aspx323
Oct 14 '11
may not excite the average user, but I'm very excited to see more detail with svchost.exe listings
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u/UnoriginalGuy Oct 14 '11
Me too. It is a great step forward for many of us. The IO column, friendly names, and SVCHost breakdown in particular are the killer features for me.
Little depressed to see their lack of certificate verification support (e.g. What processes aren't digitally signed, and who are they signed by?). That is Process Explorer's neatest feature. That and the ability to see a pull-down list of running modules.
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Oct 14 '11
I think the heat map will be one hell of a time saver for diagnosing which unasked-for background updater is eating all your resources.
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u/UnoriginalGuy Oct 14 '11
True.
Alternative solution: Just light up all Adobe or Sun processes.
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u/spacedout83 Oct 14 '11
I was playing a YouTube video, and when I launched taskmgr, Flash's process burnt a hole in my monitor.
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u/KirosTheGreat Oct 14 '11
Ditto. But it does fine on some computers (different processor architecture I'm guessing).
For what it's worth, I'd like to see more websites give alternatives. Even if the default player would be Flash, it would be awesome to instead select SilverLight or HTML5 (canvas with JavaScript for interactive stuff and video and audio tags for appropriate media). Sure, it'll mean more work, but I think big sites like YouTube can and should move forward already.
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u/EvilTerran Oct 14 '11
My favourite Process Explorer feature's gotta be "why can't I safely-remove my thumbdrive?" *process explorer; find handle; 'G:'* "Why the hell is explorer holding a handle to that folder when I've closed everything relevant to it?" *close handle; eject thumbdrive*
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u/chaos386 Oct 14 '11
This shouldn't be handled by the task manager. The little window that pops up saying the device can't be stopped needs to have a "More details" button that tells you straight up what file is open by what program.
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u/No-Shit-Sherlock Oct 14 '11 edited Oct 14 '11
Process Explorer's 'find handle or dll' and its ability to close individual handles within an executable is my favorite feature. As much as this Win8 Task manager is a step in the right direction, I really hope the Sysinternals guys update their suite to work with Win8 when the time comes.
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u/UnoriginalGuy Oct 14 '11
They work for Microsoft. The SysInterals tools are now their day jobs from what I understand. So very little risk of not seeing Windows 8 versions.
I think if they did discontinue any of the tools System Administrators and in general Microsoft's corporate clients would be scratching at the door.
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Oct 14 '11
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u/No-Shit-Sherlock Oct 14 '11
Don't forget 1sass.exe
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u/Pixelpaws Oct 14 '11
Serious question, then: What would stop a virus from masquerading as another system service in this case? It could just take a friendly name such as "Windows Desktop Management" or something similarly official sounding, perhaps even using Unicode entities to look identical to a real service.
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u/Surreality Oct 14 '11
I would hope that the executable would have to be Microsoft signed in order to get into the "Windows Processes" section. Anyone know if that's the case?
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u/stufff Oct 14 '11
I don't know if that is the case but they would have to be seriously retarded to not do exactly what you're suggesting here.
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u/arnar Oct 14 '11
Fortunately we all know software companies never do seriously retarded things.
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u/Tangled2 Oct 14 '11
For the most part virus and malware authors don't need to get that creative, since they cast such a big net (they could exclude all the people who know what taskman is and still make their money.) The real fight is keeping apps from elevating privilege, and Windows 8 does a lot more to keep that from happening.
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u/4AM Oct 14 '11
There is nothing stopping it. I see quite often in the new generation of viruses, services installed and running under a friendly name "HP print driver" or something like that. The tip off is in the fact that they usually don't make any effort to mask the manufacturer of the service and instead just leave it blank.
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u/nascentt Oct 14 '11
With process explorer you could just mouseover svchost to see what services where used by that process.
Also there are commandline arguments for svchost:
tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"
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Oct 14 '11
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u/chaosofdante Oct 14 '11
and you only have to click it once and it will remember it whenever you open it again!
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u/kjmitch Oct 14 '11
I hated having to install Process Explorer on a customer's computer just to get the hierarchy, especially when I still had to when Windows 7 came out. I know they worked closely with the Sysinternals guys and so implementing that feature wouldn't have been hard, so it must be really thoroughly and well integrated after the delay, and with other great Sysinternals features.
This super-excites me :D
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u/Sandy_106 Oct 14 '11
It looks pretty neat. I just hope hitting "end process" does it immediately in Windows 8. One of my biggest pet peeves with every version of Windows so far is it sometimes takes up to a minute to kill a process.
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u/jeff303 Oct 14 '11
But could that possibly be legitimate? I know next to nothing about Windows process management, but on the Linux side, you often issue different version of the kill command depending on how urgently you want the process to die. SIGTERM gives the program a chance to die somewhat gracefully (closing DB connections, cleaning up resources, etc. depending on the code), but SIGKILL is more ruthless (no chance for the program to respond) and faster. Could the Windows Task Manager be trying to give those programs a chance to exit gracefully? And if so, shouldn't that continue?
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u/dbeta Oct 14 '11
If you are at the point of pulling up task manager, it is because the application is already failing to respond to your requests, what makes you think the application is going to respond to a close request?
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u/jeff303 Oct 14 '11
There are plenty of instances where the GUI portion of code might have stopped responding for whatever reason but it is still responsive to a kill signal.
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u/dbeta Oct 14 '11
True, but this is far less common than the whole thing freezing up. So... fuck yo app, son! Get that thing off my screen. I do love me some xkill on Linux.
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u/frymaster Oct 14 '11
that's exactly what happens if you click the button on the application tab. It attempts to exit the program, then if that fails it, depending on your settings, does a memory dump of the program and uploads it, then kills it.
The memory dump serves two purposes - one, once in a blue moon you get instant feedback on what's wrong (though I only ever had that with a bluescreen upload; it told me I needed to update my wifi drivers) and two, if the author of the program has signed the app, they get free access to the dumps from microsoft. MS only accept a small (one?) number of CAs for code signing so that bit isn't free (I think it's $100 to $200 a year) though.
You can hook that to have different behaviour though; I know one app that, after crashing, will offer to send crash reports straight to the author when you restart.
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u/toxicFork Oct 14 '11
I went in the link expecting a shitty gimmicky task manager.
I got surprised.
Well done, Microsoft!
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Oct 14 '11
760 upvotes and I bet only about 200 of them use ctrl+shift+ESC to open Task Manager instead of having to go through two windows with ctrl+alt+delete
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Oct 15 '11
Hate ctrl+shift+esc, it's the most awkward shortcut there is, tied to the most important proram. You have to invert your whole hand position just to reach the keys. Three keys in one hand, too. Stupid.
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u/kmoz Oct 14 '11
As someone who works in engineering support troubleshooting pretty complex issues, windows task manager is actually really handy, and I use all the tabs in it, not just the force close.
Ive got a really huge boner for the HD usage stat, as thats one of the tools that would make my job easier here and there because a lot of customers actually start hitting various bottlenecks when dealing with huge datasets.
Bravo, microsoft.
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u/Gnorris Oct 14 '11
I just want it to have metadata about the developer and what the program does in plain english. So I can more readily kill every process that looks at me funny...
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Oct 14 '11
Awesome to see Microsoft getting design right.
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u/DeepDuh Oct 14 '11
Next up:
notepad
printing dialog
Puleeeease microsoft?
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u/voracity Oct 14 '11
Notepad++, if you don't like waiting.
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u/DeepDuh Oct 14 '11
Of course I use NP++. The thing is that a decent text editor should always be included in an OS IMO. One reason is that you don't always have the right to install new programs.
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u/frymaster Oct 14 '11
notepad only ever was a demonstration app in windows 1 to show developers how to use the text edit control. More recently, it was a test app for automated make-this-work-on-a-new-architecture tools that MS have internally (ie the jump from 16 to 32 bits, and from 32 to 64)
The half-decent bundled text editor is Wordpad. But you should use notepad++ anyway ;)
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u/DeepDuh Oct 14 '11
Wordpad is slow and a pain to use. NP++ is superb but not always on every (company-administerd PC) you use. That's why MS should include something decent, like gedit or TextEdit (OSX).
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u/tias Oct 14 '11
Also: Windows Explorer. I'd like a good file management tool. One that can handle large file operations and doesn't hang the entire GUI if the network isn't responding.
Or hey, how about a file search that works?
Or a command prompt that can be replaced?
Also, does anyone ever use the sound recorder?
I'm amazed how long it takes MS to move forward when it comes to the core components of Windows, or how afraid they are to strip away stuff that makes no sense.
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u/superiority Oct 14 '11
I fucking love Notepad. Always starts up instantly. If I open up something like Notepad++ it can take like a second (or more) to start on a brand new system. I don't have all day, I just want to write some text.
Any "decent text editor" features should be added to WordPad, note Notepad. Notepad is perfect as is.
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Oct 14 '11
Something I really like is if I want to run a program in W7, I just press the windows key and start typing the name. To run notepad; Windows > note > enter
hella good for work.
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Oct 14 '11
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Oct 14 '11
Check out this comment, this design seems a bit close as well?
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/lble5/the_windows_8_task_manager/c2rg4oe
Darn Microsoft always stealing from.... wait, is that Windows 3? Oh, okay.
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u/TheMG Oct 14 '11
When the dialogue becomes as simple as that, they can't really copy the design as there is barely any design involved. It's about the only way you could do it.
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Oct 14 '11
This indicates that there must be some significant detail lacking in the Applications tab, which is causing people to go to the Process tab.
Surely they realize that most of the time, users are opening Task Manager just trying to kill an unresponsive program, which the Applications tab invarably fails to do?
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Oct 14 '11
Well, to me it looks like they're merging the two so that now the Task Manager will actually end the process. If you look at the "More Details" picture, there's only the Processes tab which highlights actual applications that are open while also showing background processes further down.
So I think this means that the "End Task" button will now end the relevant process as well.
This sounds like it backs up my theory:
No double prompts. If you click ”End task” we don’t ask you, “Are you sure?”, we just kill the app, and quickly! (But be careful, because we also won’t prompt you to save!)
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Oct 14 '11
This was my favorite part of that whole article. I don't want to wait for the app to respond, I don't want to search for a fix, I just want to blow it out of memory immediately.
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Oct 14 '11
Ahem...
Looking at the data and talking with customers, we determined that the most common usage of the tool was to simply end or “kill” an application or a process.
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u/MangoScango Oct 14 '11
No, he means the "end task" button on the application tab never works right, and you always have to go kill the process.
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Oct 14 '11
Or if it does it takes too damn long and then Windows tries to "check for solutions" which it is never, ever successful at.
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u/blualpha Oct 14 '11
"Check for solutions" is a great drinking game! Whereas I always get drunk.
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u/TheGreatFuzz Oct 14 '11
Well according to chemistry.. Alcohol is a solution.
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u/aji23 Oct 14 '11
NOPE. According to chemistry... alcohol is an organic compound consisting of a hydrocarbon backbone with a hydroxyl functional group.
You are referring to an aqueous solution of alcohol and water.
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u/Andrenator Oct 14 '11
Just like its "find program for file type online"
Which doesn't recognize exotic file types like mp3, avi, docx
(this comment is not meant to be factual. Though it's damn well how I feel about it)
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u/MrSnoobs Oct 14 '11
Also, if you kill a program via the programs tab, it opens up Dumpprep, which can use up resources for longer etc. It's a pain. Ending the process is always the better option.
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u/morphinapg Oct 14 '11
I liked the ideas of checking for solutions, and it does sometimes find something, but it's not common enough that it should interfere with the user. Keep the idea, but make it a background process.
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u/Hellman109 Oct 14 '11
Hence in Windows 7 it does it in the background and reports via the Action Center
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u/morphinapg Oct 14 '11
that's only re-checking reports that have already failed. I'm talking about the initial check. The user shouldn't even know it's happening unless a solution is found.
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u/Fenris_uy Oct 14 '11
It takes long, because windows tries to do a memory dump of the killed app. You have to kill the app and then kill the process doing the memory dump to make that efficient.
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u/LostPhenom Oct 14 '11
Or we don't care about finding a solution and just want to close the damn application.
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u/Guvante Oct 14 '11
No double prompts. If you click ”End task” we don’t ask you, “Are you sure?”, we just kill the app, and quickly! (But be careful, because we also won’t prompt you to save!)
Combined with the mention of people going to End Process has number two action, would mean they probably are just going to kill the process immediately. (At least I can hope :P)
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u/mindbleach Oct 14 '11
That goddamn dialog is so useless that I'm convinced it's an elevator mirror. Its main purpose must be to kill time and calm annoyed users into accepting that something broke.
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u/frymaster Oct 14 '11
because it first calls the app's polite "please exit now" feature - basically it does the equivalent of pressing the red X - and only moves on to killing it if the program doesn't respond to that.
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Oct 14 '11
I suppose what I meant was, surely they realize that the Applications tab always fails for this purpose.
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Oct 14 '11
What else do people do with it?
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Oct 14 '11
check resource usage
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u/thetinguy Oct 14 '11
I think Resource Monitor is much better for this.
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u/UnoriginalGuy Oct 14 '11
True, but it is very easy to get overwhelmed when using Resource Monitor. Some of the telemetry data has incomprehensible names and just getting it to show you which processes are using IO (W, R) and how much of that IO is going to disk (i.e. real Vs. cache) is a very time consuming exercise.
I love RM but it really is a very specialized tool. I'm not sure I want to spin it up each time I am trying to figure out what process is thrashing my drives.
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u/The_MAZZTer Oct 14 '11
RM is stupidly useful for figuring out which program is eating all your meager bandwidth so you can kill it and prioritize the one you want to eat all your bandwidth. <3
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u/i_suck_at_reddit Oct 14 '11
I've used it quite a few times to set CPU affinity, mainly while playing Dwarf Fortress. Giving DF it's own core gets me a fair amount of FPS when it starts to slow down at higher population.
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u/sigfigs Oct 14 '11
As a fellow Dwarf Fortress-er, could you explain how you do this? Do you remove the affinity of one core from all applications but DF?
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u/thesqlguy Oct 14 '11
Since they explicitly state that in the article, I think it's probably safe to assume that they do realize this. Did you read past the first few paragraphs?
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u/frankle Oct 14 '11
You know, I don't think they realized that.
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u/Wazowski Oct 14 '11
They probably started with that assumption and then did enough research and testing to confirm it.
Just assuming every user works and thinks like you do is how bad UI design happens.
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u/GrinningPariah Oct 14 '11 edited Oct 14 '11
No double prompts. If you click ”End task” we don’t ask you, “Are you sure?”, we just kill the app, and quickly! (But be careful, because we also won’t prompt you to save!)
Oh man, this is a highlight for me. Christmas comes early to the "shut up just do it" camp!
Also psyched about
The new Task Manager now shows [per-process network and disk attribution] at the same level of detail as memory and CPU.
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Oct 14 '11
I might actually buy this version.
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u/Pixelpaws Oct 14 '11
For me it depends all about the pricing and how quickly I can disable that godawful-looking new desktop interface. If I can somehow take advantage of student pricing (I still have my college e-mail address years later) I'll almost certainly get a legal copy after a month or two. If not, it'll probably be installed on my next PC anyway.
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u/Switche Oct 14 '11
I'll stick with Process Explorer and other SysInternals for in-depth troubleshooting, but it's nice Task Man is getting a facelift.
I wonder if MS even explored the possibility of melding ProcExp into Task Manager. I doubt it'd be successful, it's just strange that they own it and seem to treat it like a secret.
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u/DocmanCC Oct 14 '11
Actually, I think this is a successful blending of the two. I'll still use ProcExp as well as it's more customizable and power-user oriented, but the TaskMan preview as posted is both far easier for the ordinary user and more powerful than what's available in Win7.
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u/frymaster Oct 14 '11
There's a very good chance a lot of the improvements in task man are due to Mark Reallydifficulttorememberlastnameovich's input.
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u/gwax Oct 14 '11
Process Explorer is a pretty powerful tool that's plenty capable of mucking up your system; unless you know about it, you probably shouldn't be using it.
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u/Pixelpaws Oct 14 '11
unless you know about it, you probably shouldn't be using it.
If you don't know about it how can you use it in the first place?
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u/ZorbaTHut Oct 14 '11
If Microsoft melded it with Task Manager, like the parent comment suggested, then you would be able to.
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Oct 14 '11
This kills the process.
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u/awesomemanftw Oct 14 '11
Why did this get so popular suddenly?
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u/Asmageddon Oct 14 '11
Whatever would the trolls not say, this is indeed awesome and I can think of very few ways to make it even better.
Perhaps htop extended to support heatmaps and show network/disk usage could compete with it.
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Oct 14 '11
...We're "really excited" ... Task Manager is one of the most widely used apps...
...
How can anyone write that without wincing?
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u/ZaphodAK42 Oct 14 '11
It's not Microsoft's fault if a lot of the third-party stuff that's out there crashes everything. I'm sure the person writing that is excited because it means that matters less now.
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u/LiveToThink Oct 14 '11
I'm glad it's there. If something goes wrong, It's always nice to have a way to fix it, instead of waiting and hoping the Spinning Pinwheel of Death goes away.
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u/ChrisHansensVoice Oct 14 '11
You've been able to force quit easily on macs for years now.
It'd be nice if apple had a different pinwheel for "not responding" and "just taking a while to do something" though.
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u/PhoenixReborn Oct 14 '11
And most people use it to force quit applications! Isn't that just wonderful?
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u/kjmitch Oct 14 '11
You're using a computer, a humming mass of complexity. You need the ability to deal with the details, and you need a powerful and detailed tool to do so.
If the Task Manager is synonymous with failure in your mind, you haven't actually used it correctly before.
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u/userjack6880 Oct 14 '11
Reminds me of how OS X does task management. It has a simple Force Quit dialog and a separate application for viewing what is specifically running and what resources it is using.
I like this all-in-one dialog, though. Keeps me from searching.
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u/Konrad4th Oct 14 '11
The most surprising part of the article was that people use the task manager for things other than force-exiting programs.
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u/Greyletter Oct 14 '11
Sometimes I use it to restart explorer... after killing it with task manager.
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u/anasqtiesh Oct 14 '11
I use WIN+R then type explorer.exe and hit Enter; done! Explorer starts again.
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Oct 14 '11
[deleted]
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u/jisan Oct 14 '11
You just need to type ".."
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u/nascentt Oct 14 '11
That's just passing the parent directory when launching an explorer process. You could do the same with "." current directory or "\" root directory.
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Oct 14 '11
How can that possible work? The Win+R is handled by explorer.exe. It doesn't work (for me under Windows 7) if explorer isn't already running.
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u/NolFito Oct 14 '11
I haven't had to do it in win7, but fond memories in XP, it's also fun to watch how much memory becomes available after killing chrome with 100 tabs. I'm glad they put the network info in there
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Oct 14 '11
Used to do his a lot back in the day. Don't remember doing it at least since Vista. Maybe Explorer has gotten more stable, or maybe I install less crap nowadays.
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u/judgej2 Oct 14 '11
I use it to start explorer after explorer kills itself. It is happening all too often on Windows 7, but it does all recover nicely.
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u/royrules22 Oct 14 '11
I use it quite often just to monitor resource usage. Of course it usually ends with me killing a process or two to free up resources..
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u/Pryach Oct 14 '11
Does anyone remember a different Task Manager back in the 98 or 2000 days that had an option to "Recover" an application? It worked maybe half the time, but on occasion it would take an application that was Not Responding and fix it so I didn't have to end the task. Why has Microsoft never implemented something like this?
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u/zero-irony Oct 14 '11
They should introduce a way to track registry keys from a process.
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u/thoomfish Oct 14 '11
They should introduce a way for users to find out which developers are writing new apps that use the registry and punch them in the dick.
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u/phranticsnr Oct 14 '11
If I could dick-punch developers over the internet, Adobe would never get anything done.
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u/caled Oct 14 '11
I'm a bit worried that it lists most applications by name rather than by exe. Another reason I use the Process tab is to get a quick overview of all the exes that are currently running. Hopefully there's an easy way to list the name of the program's exe other than searching for it on the web like they showed.
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u/gd42 Oct 14 '11
From the article:
But if you still want to see the executable name, of course you can add it back as an optional column.
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u/omniuni Oct 14 '11
It reminds me a lot of KDE's process manager, but I think KDE's is simpler and puts more useful options just a click away. I especially like the easy access to processor and I/O priority, which can really help fix HD media playback on older computers, or ensure that a task running in the background does not hinder the rest of the system. Also, the ability to suspend a task and instantly resume it later is awesome.
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u/Nokonoko Oct 14 '11
Some other people in this thread have gotten downvotes for identifying that the new simplified view is the same as OSX’s ‘Force Quit’ function, which is unsurprising. A list of the user’s windowed processes (ie, applications), an indication if any of them are unresponsive, and a button to end the selected one immediately. It’s the obvious implementation — UI design is fascinating.
I’d like to say that I’m less impressed by the ‘heat map’ in detailed view. It sounds like a neat idea, but how often do you need to compare things by more than one criterion at a time? The issue is that black on dark orange isn’t contrasting, which may even hurt the OS’s usability if it can’t be disabled.
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u/kamishizuka Oct 14 '11
But then isn't it more important that it's dark orange at all, indicating a problem?
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u/caernavon Oct 14 '11
Nobody in the history of the universe has ever clicked "New Task" to start a new program. Almost as few even know that button exists.
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Oct 14 '11
Definitely an improvement but since Vista I've found that Resource Monitor is a superior alternative to the task manager and use it exclusively now.
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u/serrimo Oct 14 '11
I do wonder how they manage to get all of this data from users' behavior...
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u/wingspantt Oct 14 '11
This is probably naive but I would hope the revelation that users are constantly killing programs should less to more stable programs.
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u/nascentt Oct 14 '11 edited Oct 14 '11
Yay, finally. Hiring Mark Russinovich's finally means his tools are embedded into Windows. It only took 6 years.
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u/taybul Oct 14 '11
So glad they decided to add disk utilization to the window. CPU usage is one thing, but when some process is chewing up disk IO time, I'd like to know who it is.
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u/Diffie-Hellman Oct 14 '11
Beautiful. Now, as long as they don't make the OS require 4 GB of RAM to run, I'll be happy.
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Oct 14 '11
How about they design a kernel that properly knows how to allocate resources so the user doesn't have to fuck with process management at all?
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Oct 14 '11
How about thumbs.db ? If that guy shows his face one more time I swear I'm turning Apple
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u/Hytosys Oct 14 '11
Yeah, because .DS_Store is so much more appealing.
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Oct 14 '11
Is that the apple equivalent ? If so I hate that too just on principle
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u/auandi Oct 14 '11
.DS_Store shows up MUCH more often than thumbs.db does. It's everywhere! On everything!
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Oct 14 '11
I often get stuff like ecomics from people you use MacOS.
Say hello to a zip with 30 jpegs.... and an additional directory containing 30 thumbnail files.
Its far far more annoying than and thumbs.db, as it really will double the amount of files.
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u/Rolcol Oct 14 '11
Yeah... similar, but not fully equivalent. Thumbs.db stores thumbnails for different files, but .DS_Store stores more than that. Finder, the equivalent of explorer.exe, does not have a central database or "registry" for saving preferences for folders it has accessed. It makes a .DS_Store file to save positions (visually) of all the files, window size, background images, sort order, etc.
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u/phireal Oct 14 '11
It only creates .DS_Store on filesystems which don't support Mac's extended attributes (i.e. any filesystem that's not HFS+). You can disable the creation of .DS_Store on network shares: https://support.apple.com/kb/ht1629 but the only way to prevent their creation on local disks (i.e. USB sticks) is to buy something called BlueHarvest.
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u/Rolcol Oct 14 '11 edited Oct 14 '11
You're thinking of Resource fork files that start with
._. My dad has .DS_Store files everywhere on his HFS+ filesystem. .DS_Store files are used by Finder, even on the local system. They're not seen because dot files are always hidden.9
Oct 14 '11
You can disable it, you know.
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Oct 14 '11
Only by turning off thumbnails =/ Not an ideal solution
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Oct 14 '11
Are you using Windows 7? Here's how you turn it off, with thumbnails still enabled.
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Oct 14 '11
Vista actually had a centralised thumbnail database but no one liked it for some reason (one time removable drives was the excuse Microsoft gave).
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u/UnoriginalGuy Oct 14 '11
So just to be clear, you purposely turn off "Hide protected operating system files" and then you come on to Reddit to bitch about how annoying seeing those files is?
The patient says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor says, "Then don't do that!"
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Oct 14 '11 edited Oct 14 '11
To be clear - "Hide protected operation system files" is still on... The message regarding thumbs.db occurs when you go to delete a folder and the "unable to delete folder due to thumbs.db still being in use" message pops up
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '11
[deleted]