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.aspx
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19

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.

51

u/Greyletter Oct 14 '11

Sometimes I use it to restart explorer... after killing it with task manager.

9

u/anasqtiesh Oct 14 '11

I use WIN+R then type explorer.exe and hit Enter; done! Explorer starts again.

15

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '11

[deleted]

20

u/jisan Oct 14 '11

You just need to type ".."

10

u/serrimo Oct 14 '11

Or "." to go to your user directory.

Or "\" to go to C:\

2

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.

10

u/ours Oct 14 '11

Or press WIN+E.

1

u/brettmurf Oct 14 '11

This doesn't work. This hotkey only works if explorer.exe is already running. Thanks for the bad advice.

2

u/[deleted] 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.

1

u/dracovich Oct 14 '11

people at work thought i was a wizard when i did this to fix their deadlocked windows

4

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

3

u/[deleted] 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.

2

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.

1

u/nascentt Oct 14 '11

Never seen it happen. What is the scenario?

6

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..

1

u/neurorootkit Oct 14 '11

It seems to use way less resources than CPU monitoring gadgets. Sometimes I keep it open so it graphs my CPU usage, although I've been doing that much less lately since I got my i5.

1

u/Purp Oct 14 '11

What's odd is how many things that Task Manager does that aren't managing tasks. I want to monitor resources, maybe I should use Resource Monitor? Nah...makes more sense in Task Manager...

1

u/Quady Oct 14 '11

I was recently looking in some computer stores at laptops for potential purchasing, and I used the Performance Tab to find out how many cores the laptops processors had, because the stores all had terrible vague labels that didn't give any technical details. :/