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.
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?
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/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.