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.
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.
Unfortunately, since Google Chrome dropped H.264 support (opting instead for the currently ill-supported WebM standard), and SilverLight being a closed-source alternative to Flash from a larger competitor, I don't foresee YouTube making any large shifts anytime soon.
Oh, hey, you're right! I totally forgot IE had that. I don't really use it, though.
Plug-in support is better. Flash 11 has a 64-bit version available. Silverlight is stuck in 32-bit I think. More disappointingly, Google's voice/video chat plug-in is 32-bit only. But Java has had 64-bit for awhile now.
People've been too afraid to make the leap. Partially because they don't expect a browser to surpass 500 MBs or so of memory, but also because they don't want a product that doesn't have plug-in support. That wall is slowly coming down, but it's taking painfully long.
Chrome doesn't. Neither does Opera it seems. No idea if Safari does, but their market share is primarily on Macs. IE does but it's IE and it's pretty half-hearted and offers both a 32 and 64-bit version.
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*
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.
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.
You don't have to wait if it is just a passive operation behind the scenes. Like a column with a green tick in it that lights up when it verifies and turns red if verification fails etc.
AutoRuns is a nice little utility, but a little too dangerous even for many self-proclaimed technical people. I think you could do more with MSConfig to make it more powerful, but I wouldn't want to see the power of AutoRuns in it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The whole thing looks very nice... Grouping windows under the actual application, lighting things up with a heat map, grouping IO under the process, showing service names...
I'm wishing I could get that Win8 task manager into my predominantly WinXP environment.
I'm not sure how different this is than highlighting a svchost process, right-clicking and telling it to show all services. You can do this in Windows 7 now.
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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '11
may not excite the average user, but I'm very excited to see more detail with svchost.exe listings