Msdn Manager
Sep 21, 2017 Microsoft Download Manager is free and available for download now. Formerly hosted online in MSDN under the Visual Studio 2005 node. Mar 18, 2013 how to download softwares from the msdn website using a download manager, i'm not happy with the inbuilt download manager as they just don't have strength.
It's an improvement, but I still feel like you're duplicating features of your own excellent tool (Process Explorer). I don't get this. You don't want to 'scare' users, yet by hiding the technical stuff from them and always baby-feeding them simple things, these 'users' will never become power users and will never be able to help themselves. Hear me out for this one: I think I speak for most of us when I say that, for the love of God and everything that's holy, please, PLEASE, make an option to 'always enable more details' or 'always enable advanced view' or something to this effect.
Just as with the copy file dialog, it becomes EXTREMELY irritating when I, a power user, has to click on 'more details' EVERY SINGLE TIME to see what's happening under the hood, so to speak. So please, do us all a favor and grant us the option to enable the advanced view for these tools/windows/dialogs by default, and make it stick between reboots! This I'm excited about!
Great, great job. Just one thing – this is Windows – not Mac OS/X – why not have a 'less' button instead and by default show the detailed view (not just here, but everywhere there is now a 'more' button). That way, people will see the power of Windows first hand – they don't have to do anything about it, but at least it puts the idea(s) in their head. People that really are afraid of seeing/thinking too much can use the 'less' button (and go ahead and make it 'stick' for them). This is great work, Steven. I was thinking about the End Task button: Maybe an even faster way to kill a process would be to have the End Task button appear on the same line as the app name (on the right), when the mouse hovers over it, wouldn't it?
That would make it an easy one click operation. To keep the End Task visible (in case people who don't move the mouse), you would keep bottom End Task button, and add checkboxes next to the app/process names. This would even add the ability to kill more than one process at a time. Or to go even further: the Window Close button could offer End Task functionality when an application stops responding. Let's face it, when you get the 'Not responding' message, if you try to click Close, it's obviously to force close the offending app (maybe with a warning if necessary). Love the service host friendly names; we've been waiting for that a long time.
Nice improvements, but geez the graphical 'style' you've got going on with Win8 Aero is just bizarre. Large centered title font (that doesn't stay centered depending on what you've selected), opaque blue border with grey elements? A file menu (still)? Windows 95-era blockiness? I hope this design is being worked on still.
I do like the org of the new task manager (mostly), but although Win7's was barely changed, I hope you're taking the time to make the desktop look a little more cohesive. I realize I'm not going to get (what I see as obvious) design similarities with Metro, but it would be nice to see the same design amongst the desktop apps themselves. @Steven Sinofsky: You said '@sovan suspended apps do not consume CPU and if other apps need the RAM then the suspended apps are unloaded. So you do not pay any penalty and nothing is slower.' This is an incomplete answers. Yes you do pay a penalty — your 'active apps' list is polluted with applications you no longer care about.
When you swipe between apps it takes longer because you have to swipe through them. Using the switcher takes you longer to identify the app you want because it's polluted by these dead apps you no longer care about. Give up your sacred cow of 'No Chrome even if it hurts' on this Steven; please give us the ability to close metro apps without having to resort to opening a task manager. Thank you very much for your quick reply.just now signed up in windows live and posting comments.I am having another problem i.e. When I play games or play any hd video, video playback or the game slows down but when the videos or the game is played in windows 7 in same pc it plays smoothly.dont know the reason might be it is dev preview so this kind of problem is occuring.by the way start screen and switching between desktop and other metro apps is smooth and fast and I like the swaping way to switch from left from one app to other.i have done this in my three years old desktop and swaping is really faster.its 2.30 am and i am awake to post on your blog. Also really liking the new task manager.
I especially love the addition of disk and network information in a more sensible format (transfer rate) because read/write delta wasn't very informative as the interval of measurement seemingly wasn't constant. I have two wishes/suggestions: – When resizing the task manager window, expand the first column ('Process') and keep everything else ('Status', 'CPU', etc.) aligned right. – Maybe add a checkbox to the bottom of the detail view 'Always show detailed view', because for us power users, this new design means having perform an additional mouse click with almost every use of the new Task Manager. Great work, otherwise! Great improvement, very nice!!! Bug: when 'Always on Top' is selected, Performance tab, Ethernet, View Network Details, then you can't see the network details window.
Bug: the network details window is not resizable, and because it refreshes, you can't view the whole list without scrolling down again every 60 seconds. Bug: Performance tab, CPU, show kernel times: I don't see a different color for kernel times (or any change when showing kernel times). Request: please make the columns auto-resize or otherwise make it unnecessary to resize column headers all the time. When a column is automatically resized, it should include the column header name in the calculation, not just the data, or else you often can't see the description of the data. Request: on the Startup tab, please list much more information, similar to what you get with Sysinternals Autoruns.exe (or have an Advanced button to show this).
Otherwise, this tab is not very useful. I love the Windows 8 Task Manager, the groupings and friendly names (no more svchost.exe!), but you didn't show the Task Manager, just the Processes tab. I agree on the comment about dead processes that still show up in the Processes tab. Maybe they would be easier to spot if they could be grayed out, and there could be a context menu option to end all the dead processes. There is also this big discrepancy in Windows 7 between the memory used in the Processes tab (for instance 744MB) and the memory used in the Performance tab (1.55GB).
I really would like to be able to see where these memory leaks come from, for instance from the browser when playing dozens of Flash videos in the same YouTube tabs, or after downloading files. It would help troubleshooting memory issues a lot. I don't know if the Performance tab has changed, but since it monitors the CPU and other areas, it would be great to add temperature monitoring to it, or to a separate tab. All CPUs, GPUs, hard drives, now come with built-in temperature sensors, and some computer cases even come with their own, yet I can't see this basic information that is important to monitor in Task Manager. I need to use third-party tools to access SMART and other properties. By the way, it would be great to have a repository of all these screenshots for reference, especially for people who want to discover Windows 8 but can't install the early builds.
And please, make the first beta build available in a non-ISO format, as a small executable that can be run directly from Windows, for instance to upgrade an existing installation or to install on a second partition, and will download the rest of the image as needed. The extra step of burning a DVD just to install a beta version is overkill and really archaic.
@WindowsVista567 One of the principles of WP7 is focusing on battery life, that's why the OS care so much about memory. WP7 freezes all app activity to do that In fact, there is a way on closing apps, you only need to go back and back until you reach the first page of the app (there is no official X button or menu to close an app) The idea on closing apps maybe is because privacy concerns, but as you may read before, Windows 8 is focused on the idea that every single user must have an own account on the Pc/Tablet and is very easy to switch between them Maybe I understand your point if you write some examples on why you need to close apps Well, that is what i think about closing apps. Maybe some official statement helps Sorry about my bad english, hope you understand what I try to say. I like the change, however I still believe, after playing with the new Task Manager, that you failed to address the most basic question for power users: 'Why do people use third party tools, like Process Explorer, and how can we bring that functionality in here.'
And after playing with it, and even in your post here it is clear that you did address a few cosmetical changes, (and they are great!), and a new heatmap, but that is really all. Power users will still require to use third party tools, you have done nothing really for power users.
Hi, nice work! In response to what @someone earlier mentioned I believe an conclusion of this would be It look like it does because it's basically made for tablet's & touch. Would also like repeat and appreciate the importance from another comment, meaning a wish for having RESTART for processes everywhere which is possible and not only explorer.exe Will be Grateful for a feature like that. Thanks Ryan & team workers @Steven Sinofsky Have to send some credit also for the initiative in make this discussion come true here on your blog.
Make people express their real view on things not always that easy when it comes to get involved and sharing opinions between different users. My highest vote for made this real and hope Microsoft keep on working in this way, bringing users & representatives together. Good for the future. I love what you are doing with the task manager and other parts of the desktop UI – improve it a bit more and you won't be able to convince us that we need metro UI. A little suggestion though – either make the default view the expended view or add to the minimized view the ability to see the child windows of each main window – because a lot of the time only one instance of word gets stack and I need to restart only that and now every instance of word that runs, or only the new message in outlook is stack and o don't want to restart the entire OUTLOOK so please consider this – and that will surely make that minimized view the most used one. One other question related to this topic. I find personally that a big cause of performance problems for my machine is when I have several IE tabs open, and each website is doing some background processing as though the page were in the foreground.
The more frustrating aspect of this is that it's usually due to the advertising on the page, for which there is no reason when the page is hidden from view. This often chews up the CPU resources to the point of making the machine sluggish (and if on a mobile machine, needlessly eating battery life). I love the notion of suspending an app for this reason. Is there any user control over this, or will IE handle something like this automatically? I can imagine not every website will play nicely with that, but I don't really care.
I would imagine the web standards circles could come up with some standard for a site to tell the browser whether or not it can safely suspend the site. Awesome, awesome, and awesome. Many fantastic enhancements!
I am so glad the disk utilization is finally added to the Task Manager–as you mention, this is one of the most common bottlenecks, but few users realize this. Even casual users can understand the way you are presenting this data. I also love the idea of the web lookup for processes–in principle. May I suggest to take it a step further?
Perhaps by an opt-in setting, why not add a process lookup that goes directly to the Microsoft Security Essentials database? Looking it up on the web is super, super noisy, and the information is often simply wrong, or worse, just a ploy to get you to buy something.
I hope this also addresses this issue of app windows that don't have an associated taskbar button. One of the more infuriating situations that can occasionally occur with a Windows-based app is that the app presents a modal dialog BEHIND the parent window. There's no choice but to kill the process in that scenario. One thing I would like to see at a glance (perhaps an icon) is if a particular executable is digitally signed or not (optional column to see the signer's name). This really helps track down potential malware and/or processes going by names that portend to be real well known applications, where a lack of signing (or a strange/unexpected signer's name) is a great indicator. This is one of the things that cause me to download the SysInternals Suite whenever I'm at that relative's house with the 'computer problem'.
My comment isn't posting properly so I'm trying again (I hope this doesn't double post, I'm sorry if it does) ———- This is a great improvement on the windows 7 task manager, and it looks great. I would like to put in my only negative feedback on the chance that it helps weigh any decision. I personally like using processor explorer, not just because it's free, very detailed, and gives a lot of options, but mainly for one specific feature. It has a TREE view of the applications.
I can see what process is running what, and has actually helped several times in easily identifying viruses or malware that is running under a process that it normally shouldn't, and also allows me to quickly find what I'm looking for. I know that the group view helps in that regard, but it's really not the same.
There are also a few other helpful features from processor explorer, such as the coloring for native vs managed processes vs services, etc. While this is an excellent step in the right direction, especially for more tech savvy users, I think it's still missing some of the key features that true power users would want. I really hope you guys go another few steps forward with these thoughts in mind.
I would hate to see all of the work get put in only to have people once again just replace task manager with another 3rd party application because it was missing a really important feature. Also, where's explorer on the list? Is it just not running, or is it hidden down below under some of the windows components? Just wondering if it's just labeled as a system component, or what? I forgot to mention. Probably the most invaluable features in process explorer are the abilities to view loaded assemblies in a process, view loaded handles in a process, and find (and optionally kill) a loaded handle via search. There have been plenty of times I've also had to track down malware or stubborn unclosed file handles via these features.
Having them built in would almost certainly make me use the task manager in Windows 8 as opposed to just completely replacing it right after a fresh install. I would feel like it would be a complete waste if you guys spent so much time on a new, completely overhauled version of task manager only to have the exact same fate because it still isn't any more useful to most power users. Changes I'd like to see: In the same way as it highlights an unresponsive app, it should highlight an app that is 'using a lot of processor time', 'using a lot of memory', 'accessing the disk a lot'. Based on for example a task using 90% of a CPU's time for last 10 secs to 1 minute. Rather than just 'End Task', why not 'Close Task' as default (disabled for unresponsive apps). No reason to be quite so brutal unless necessary.
Close Task would do appropriate thing for apps, services, etc. Maybe rename 'End Task' to 'Force close' to match other usage in windows (shutdown, etc.) Or vice versa. This is great!
You really have improved the task manager. The heat mapping was a great idea.
No more having to sort the CPU usage column to find that misbehaving app. I hope you continue to improve other aspects of the Windows desktop experience. One 'simple' suggestion is to expand the glass effect to more applications. Having a semi transparent glass background for explorer, notepad, and the command prompt would be pretty nice. Heck, even the calculator could use more glass.
Toss out the blue tints and bring on the transparency! I would like first to congratulate the development team of Windows 8 for the excellent work and for transparency and feedback to the User.
I would like to see a suggestion that a well be the most complex of great help to control and analyze the most complete running applications. My suggestion is this: I would like to see in Task Manager using the GPU that each application is using, because there is still a software that does that, at least I know. I use a third party application to see the general use of the GPU which is the 'EVGA Precision'. Another suggestion that I see being very useful is the Start screen: I think instead of having one horizontal scroll bar, the page should just roll left or right so that the User drag the mouse to the far side of the screen you want. I'm definitely a fan of the new Task Manager, but xpclient's list of problems seems quite valid. Not remembering the last open tab and requiring elevation (!) are close to being deal breakers for me.
I noticed another small UI problem in the Windows Developer Preview: clicking 'More details' or 'Fewer details' when the window is maximised puts the window in a strange state (somewhat similar to when the command prompt is 'maximised'). While not strictly related to the Task Manager, thanks for adding 'Exit Explorer' to the taskbar context menu when right-clicking while holding the control and shift keys (though why not just require the shift key?). Is it possible to add 'Restart Explorer' as well? Why are you using a SysTabControl32 window but not putting anything underneath it? The empty control at the top of the window looks odd. Finally, are you ever going to open up 'Direct UI' and let other developers use it? I know WinRT and Metro style apps are the focus for Windows 8, but I'm sure that native developers would appreciate a modern UI framework for creating desktop programs.
Kudos to the Windows Team! Great work on everything so far. The heatmaps are a wonderful addition, as well as per-app network and, especially, disk usage. I have 3 questions: 'Search the Web' in the context menu was a bit confusing for me. Even I did not know exactly what it did until I clicked it. Perhaps the name of this feature should be looked at more closely. Second, How can applications harness the power of using friendly names in the new task manager?
I still see processes like 'SMSvcHost.exe' in the screenshots posted above. Last, will there be an option to.always.
enable showing processes for all users? In Windows 7 it is jarring to have windows close/open another Task Manager just to see all the processes running on a given system. Excellent work. Keep the blog posts coming. The insight behind all these changes is beyond interesting and incredibly refreshing! Even in W7 it happens that processes that I try to kill canot be killed or killing takes a very long time.
I dont talk about System-Processes. I talk about processes that I started under my user-context. This ist strange and annoying (some times I turn off the pc because of this). As long as the stability of the OS is not in danger or possible loss of data is not an issue if permissions allow this an process-kill should be executed without hesitation. In first place its the user behind the system that is the decisionmaker and not the OS. If I tell the OS kill this process I want the OS to kill the process immediately and remove the process from memory and not have to wait for for hours or undefinitely. I realy wonder why in the days of preemtive multitasking OS this is still an issue.
To make clear: I like W7 since it is rock stable. (P.S.: Sorry for my bad english. As I'm not from an english speaking country anyway I hope you half way understood what I meant.). The very concept of Task Manager is highly questionable. On what basis are people killing processes? Do they know what they're doing?
The mere fact of having a 'Search the web' link suggests not. Is the process in question using excessive resources? Compared to what? For how long?
What is the baseline? What does 'Not responding' mean? Does it mean hung? Ignoring something? Is my work saved? What does 'task' mean anyway? Why doesn't the user get a response.from something.
when they click 'x' to close a window and nothing happens within the timeout period? The UI should.always. respond to user requests, in some legitimate and, more importantly, timely manner – else, epic fail. Why doesn't the operating system just kill (or at least offer to kill) hung processes of its own accord? Why does the user have to intervene, and run a program to close another program? Why doesn't the operating system alert the user to a process that has exceeded some predefined CPU or memory threshold, offer to cycle it (close open), or better still (by far) in the case of services – just quietly restart it, and only annoy the user if an error occurs? Won't the simplified default view just encourage users to end all tasks at the end of a session – precisely what your trying to get away from?
Task Manager might have been an acceptable solution in the Win3/4 era, but now it's an embarrassment.All. process management should be the responsibility of the operating system, and.zilch.
should be the responsibility of users. The best Task Manager is no Task Manager. So there you go – i just reimagined Task Manager – gone.
I normally do not post my comments but I must admit that this is an excellant work. Keep up the great work!!! For Power users can we have an option that shows the expanded view by default. Esp when I am doing development, I don't want to keep clicking 'Show Details' or I want to keep the Task Manager running' 2. In the advanced tab, I would like to see two features which make me to go to process explorer which is available in.nix ps command for a long time Image Path Name & Command line parameters passed on to the image 3.
Can we also show Parent Process/ child process links? I am not referring to mutiple windows opened by the same process.
I am referring to for example IIS Admin Svc that opened W3 SVC. Also list of modules/DLLs loaded by the process. For other things such as list of handles, ports opened, threads etc, I don't mind going to an advanced tool like Process Explorer but in my expereiance the above are minimum requirement for a moderate power user. 'Steven Sinofsky 13 Oct 2011 12:15 PM # @sovan suspended apps do not consume CPU and if other apps need the RAM then the suspended apps are unloaded.
So you do not pay any penalty and nothing is slower.' So when I leave the app I cannot close, then i try alt tabbing, the app and its backround and its icons are all moving in the alt tab menu, still not taking resources?
And then when I drag programs from the left (touch style alt tabbing) and the program I have wanted to be closed comes into view, still not taking my time and resources? This is a really fantastic improvement. I'm looking forward to using it. (See last paragraph for bottom line). I've had one quibble with the current task manager: a process could be sucking CPU and still have a low 'CPU usage.' Back in the old days of NT4 when the current task manager was introduced, it didn't matter: most everyone had single-core CPUs and if a single thread pegged the CPU, it would show as 100% usage. A single-threaded program that pegs a single CPU is a possible red flag.
It could be a hung process that is draining my battery. Maybe I wonder if a program is utilizing multiple threads for computations. Unfortunately, today the trend towards multiple cores makes this difficult. For example, I'm writing this on a hyper-threaded quad core CPU – that means 8 logical cores.
If a thread pegs the CPU it will only show as 12% CPU usage. I often find myself going to the Process tab and hunting for processes that are using a steady 12% usage. I don't know how I'll do this in the future, For example a hyper-threaded CPU with 8 cores (which I'm sure is not far away) would have 16 logical CPUs and if a program pegs one of those, I'd have to look for one using 6% total CPU.
That is almost background noise that will be lost in the myriad of processes that routinely use a few percents of CPU on a periodic basis. The bottom line is your new task manager has a pretty 'CPU' column, but on a modern hyper-threaded many-core CPU if a user has some misbehaving single-threaded apps, they will completely miss those and not spot them (or it will be difficult to find them) because the total CPU usage of a single-threaded app will always appear to be 'low'.
Loving the new Task Manager. I have a couple of gripes, though.
First, by your own data, we see that the top reasons for using Task Manager are to determine what is consuming my memory and CPU. Why, then, are these two pieces of information not displayed on the first screen?
Why click 'More Details'? How is that easier than clicking the 'processes' tab? The argument was given that the mainstream user doesn't really want to see the extra data, but I would argue that the mainstream user doesn't use Task Manager anyway. Is that not the case? As a compromise, I would second the request for an option to 'always use advanced view'. 'i.e process working on three cores, each 50%, should show 1,5 core load.'
A column that is calculated as follows: CoreLoad=TotalCPUUsagePercent. TotalNumberOfLogicalCores / 100 Microsoft,.please. add this or something similar as a column, it would be a fantastic tool for those of us with multiple cores (i.e. Heat map the column so that any core load greater than 1 is noteworthy. Or at least do something to have kind of indicator to keep CPU usage relevant in this multicore CPU world. Ryan, nice writeup and the improvements are welcomed. How about letting a user know all of the processes that are from Windows and authorized by an icon or other notification scheme?
Why do we have to search the web to find out whether or not something is supposed to be running? We also need a way to analyze all the network communcations that are happening, in and out. Provide the tools that make operating a secure Windows environment possible.
There have very little updates in the Windows Security Blogs regarding Windows 8. Does that mean security no longer matters at Microsoft?
@Microsoft Team I just wanted to say you deserve a lot of credit for both posting all of this information and sharing it with the community, which I know is enjoyed by many! You also enjoy a lot of credit for all of the innovation and change you are attempting to put into the next version of the OS.
More than both of those though you deserve A TON of credit for digging through all of these comments and actually responding back to the community at large. Some of the crazy non-helpful mud slinging comments have got to be hard to look past. Especially after spending multiple years on all of this hard work. Just know that some of us actually appreciate what you are doing, and enjoy all of the innovation.
I do appreciate those that are at least kind in their citicism. I think the rest of you didn't get hugged enough as a child. Keep up the great work! When people find their computer running slowly they think it's that the CPU is busy, but that hasn't been the problem in years. When peoples computes are running 'slowly' the problem is a disk queue above 1 on the disk where the system page file lives. That's the cause of%99 of performance problems users encounter. I've had computer where a CPU heavy task is taking up%99 of the CPU and the computer is still responsive.
Users can have%100 of their CPU being used, but since the system is still responsive they don't check Task Manager because there's no problem. I personally wish I could easily adjust settings on my Windows systems to allow for more memory usage and less page faulting. The Windows page faulting mechanism should be less aggressive. I have all of this RAM and if it's not being used it's wasted. What the Task Manager should highlight are programs which are page faulting heavily, and programs causing the disk queue on the disk with the page file to be higher than one. The problem with this sort of stuff (at least for MSFT), is that it appeals to and reinforces the top-down, in-control, managerial mindset of the administrator and 'power user' – over the bottom-up, immersive, let-Windows-handle-it mindset that Microsoft has envisaged for the Metro user.
These two 'worldviews' are almost incompatible because they require an ontological inversion in swapping from one to the other, which becomes tiring. That's why you get that subjective thunk when you context switch from Metro to Desktop or the reverse. @mil 'needing to take over the whole screen' – no light bulb yet? All the changes are great and all, but there's nothing that show how much GPU is used by process, that single feature would make us IT and gamers very pleased with a new Task manager like the one you guys are showcasing right now.
Lets say i want to see how much GPU usage my quake3 arena use in low setting or high settings, i set my settings in quake and go in task manager i see XX%, chance settings to low and check again then you could also diagnostic what programs lag your GPU etc etc think about it. 'Fill some of the functionality gaps that drove some of our most technical customers to use other tools such as Resource Monitor and Process Explorer.' Why do you want to drive people away from Process Explorer, its not like it is a third party tool, its owned by Microsoft. During one windows life cycle Process Explorer gets updated at least 5-10 times, adding new features. Which will not happen for Task Manager.
As Steven said 'every 15 years or so we choose to update Task Manager.' Instead of duplicating the most of what Process Explorer already does, why don't you integrate both, and make one tool, which gets updated when Process Explorer core gets updated. In the default view show this minimalistic easy to use version, and on detailed view just bring in default Process Explorer view.
Its already has enough details that can satisfy any advanced user. Thanks for all the good work Steven and team! I'm loving how Windows 8 is coming together and the discussion that has evolved around it. Keep up the good work!
I think the idea floating around here of including GPU usage into the task manager is a great idea. I have one question of my own: Why keep the menu bar in the Task Manager. The rest of the desktop is moving away from the use of menus, so even with all the improvements, the menu creates the impression that it is a bit dated. Same is true for Notepad and any other Windows application that might keep the menu hanging around. In all these cases, the menu could be replaced wtih something more functional, whether it be the ribbon, adding the functionality to the main UI, or something else. Great job overall. I like the addition of disk/network usage.
I've wanted that feature for a while. I noticed in the video the there wasn't a separate processes tab. I would still like to be able to kill individual processes and not just the whole program. Over the last couple of years, I would estimate that 80% of the time when I have to forcefully end a program, it is a browser related. With each tab/window having its own process. It makes recovery very easy. If one tab is misbehaving, kill the process associated with it and the main process can attempt to relaunch that window while all other browser processes are left intact.
This has worked very well for me to minimize data/time lost. So, on to my question: when you expand an application in the task manager, does it only show windows, or are their subprocesses viewable with their own stats(and individually kill-able)? I ask this mainly because I didn't see an IE application expanded in the video, so I can't say for sure.
I, like some of the others who have posted, like to see details by default. That's one thing about the file transfer dialog box in Vista/7that I didn't like over XP. The details are hidden by default, and I constantly find myself expanding the dialog box for all, but the shortest of transfers(.
Loving this I use the task manager a LOT (I'm a sysadmin). The only thing I would add is a temperature monitor tab and an option under the resources to view the load on the graphics card. I have many engineers here that run 3D simulations that eat up a LOT of graphics power. Would be nice to know, 'you need a new graphics card' by seeing it is under heavy stress in the task manager (just as I would suggest more ram or a new cpu in the case of those being overloaded) The temperature monitor tab would be useful because I constantly get inquiries regarding hot laptops/the fan running all the time.
I would include the Fan Speed, CPU Temp Chipset temp, and GPU Temp in relation to their Thermal Limits. Use the hotspot feature to indicate which components are causing a problem. (For example if the processor is running at 90.C and it's limit is 100). @Mike Peterson just brought up an important point. There are programs on my computer that do not respond to the 'End Process' button.
One example that I can think of off the top of my head: DOSBox. Sometimes, when I try to send System Exclusive messages to my Roland MT-32 synthesizer through DOSBox, DOSBox freezes on my Windows 7 PC. This never happened on my Windows Vista PC, and when this does happen, pressing 'End Process' won't close DOSBox.
The main UI window will close, but the 'DOSBox Status Window' and the DOSBox.exe process remain open, and do not respond to the 'End Process' button in the Task Manager. Is there any chance that Windows could be changed to force all programs to respond to the 'End Process' button?
While nice, and trust me I DO use the task manager a lot, I would rather you guys focus on Windows ability to actually kill tasks. Even up to Windows 7 I still get processes from time to time that I can not kill. Frankly there should be no reason that I can't kill anything that isn't crucial to the functionality of Windows. And to be blunt it is one thing that makes me seriously look down on Microsoft and Windows.
No 3rd party process should have so much control in the OS that I can't become the hand of God and smote that SoAB with on click in the task manager! Fix this guys. Other then that. Love Windows. @Drewfus, you said 'The implicit assumption seems to be that the user knows something about non-responsive processes that the operating system doesn't know, or perhaps that this is a 'use at own risk' feature, rather than something the OS is going to take responsibility for.' Force close internet explorer window.
Create a GUI based project in C/C, C#.NET or Java language. In the main GUI thread do some heavy lifting code and you will see the GUI will hang while executing it.
So basically it happens when the poor code is written by third party. Thus, the first party (you and me) should not blame second party (that in this case is MS) for this. Port your code to.nix (GUI based such as Mac!) and you will see the same behavior. Windows OS displays you a notification if you want to close some app which is hanging or nonresponsive by sniffing some unhealthy pattern at runtime (on of which is infinite loop!). Also, if you want to close some app immediately, which is using lot of time to finish its processing and there is no user-control provided for terminating that processes, then (for these kind of scenarios) OS provides you task-manager to terminate that process.
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To make the OS predict if this app gonna crash at any point in time (AI, cybernetics, machine learning?), this would require to redefine the concept of OS. Impossible is nothing but I guess we are at least looking somewhere after 2020 to make it happen. If you can expand the tree and see the services listed right there, it'd be great if you could also start and stop them right there. But I'll still use Process Explorer, for one reason: Find Handle. If I try to delete a file, and Windows says some process is using it, Process Explorer will tell me which process that is, so I can either switch to that app and exit it cleanly, or kill the process. I encounter this probably at least once a week — definitely often enough to be worth switching permanently to Process Explorer. If you added this functionality to Task Manager, I would probably never need to switch.
I want to take a moment to thank everyone reading and commenting on this blog for all of your interest and for the insightful comments that have been posted. For the last couple years, we have been hard at work designing and building a product for you, so it is a huge thrill for us to be able to finally get to talk about the features in detail and hear what you have to say about it!
I just came from a 2 hour meeting with members of the Task Manager feature team where we all read through your comments together. Your passion for Windows 8 is invigorating and your feedback will help us improve the product. Thanks for participating in the blog and thanks for making this a two way discussion! –Ryan and the rest of the Task Manager feature crew. First of all I am really getting into the new Metro UI and love it that I can still switch back to the desktop. The switching is NOT a jar, it's nicely done. I'm testing on an older Acer Aconia W500P, so I'm missing out on the side screen stuff.
(Search YouTube for 'AdamsTaiwan' to see my son use it.) As a power user/developer one thing I like to learn first is keyboard shortcuts. In your next blog, can you create a table list of keyboard shortcuts and mark them present and future (I know some changes will be made)? I'm sure this would make other power users like myself happier. The ones that I had discovered myself have made a big different in how I much like the new changes. @BumbleBritches57, do you even have Win8 dev preview installed on your machine? Try it, then come with some real complaint related to the topic under consideration.
As Ryan said, search works as you were asking (are you happy? Complaints about MSN should goto somewhere like Compared to Google, Bing is waaaay behind spreading adware. Did you ever log a complaint on their blog? Use IE9 with ActiveX filtering and Tracking protection ON and you will at least not have any complaint about ads. Or you can stick to some Goofy browser and keep complaining. @Microsoft, a troll will always be a troll no matter how flexible you make your products! @all, please if you see a problem, let's discuss it.
If you like something, appreciate that. If you don't have anything to say, keep quite. If you are a troll, then you are at wrong place (as obviously this is not engadget.com). @BumbleBritches57: I tried a similar experiment like the one you suggested and here are my findings: I looked at the new task manager for a minute, I fall in love with it and I cannot wait to have this and other similar improvements on my desktop. It makes my life easier and it is pretty too. Then I looked at the Metro UI Start Menu and I got nauseous. So even though Metro has its applications (my Windows Phone 7 makes me happy the way it looks) they are giving a bad reputation to all their other platforms because of their persistence on useless applications like the Start Menu for the desktop platform.
For our desktops, what we need is more good work from people like Ryan and less silly research on better paradigms than Windows. If there was anything better we would be using it already. @Drewfus: What you're suggesting is, of course, the WinRT model for process management lifecycle whereby the OS is entirely responsible for managing if and when a process is killed and applications.have. to be written in a way that they continuously persist settings and data because they have to survive being killed with little or no warning. It'd be great if all Win32 apps followed a similar model and then process management could be entirely the job of the OS. As it is, that's not the case and there are still some Win32 apps that are doing useful work despite the fact they don't pump window messages often enough (and thus appear 'not responding') so alas we aren't really in a world where arbitrarily killing hung processes is a safe option. @WindowsVista567: Processes don't have any say in whether or not they respond to the End Process buttton, they're just terminated.
However the operating system won't kill them if they're currently executing code in kernel mode, because killing a process inside an OS function – which might therefore hold system wide locks or be updating internal data structures – could destabilize the whole system. The application will quit when the thread leaves kernel mode, but obviously if something has caused it to get stuck there then you see the seemingly 'unkillable' problem. @Ryan Haveson: Your team are doing a great job and it's always interesting to see the thought process and research behind these sort of changes. For example, pretty much everyone would anecdotely suggest that the main use of Task Manager is to kill processes, but it's interesting to see that you put actual research into confirming this.
As we have seen many times before, what anecdotely seems 'right' is often not the case! As opposed to Win32's: XXXapp Stops Working dialog, if the Metro app hangs there is no such notification. The only thing you can do is to open the Task Manager and kill the process and reopen the app. I too believe that this behavior is confined to developer preview and they would come up with some intuitive way for Metro app that follows a lousy path. Also, even if there is some code running in kernel mode in a separate thread, OS offers the app with closing event so it can wrap up the threads and persist its settings/data. If the app is closed from Task Manager by pressing End Task on Applications tab, the closing event is still fired with TaskManagerClosing flag. If you close it from processes tab, it closes immediately like in case of power loss.
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It all depends upon the strength and weaknesses of application architecture how you manage threads and handle the critical scenarios. 'The most noticeable difference in the new processes tab is the new heat map, which represents different values with color.' Different values or different.ranges. of values? Regardless, i can't determine what these values or ranges are. Where is the key?
Incredibly, this is deemed irrelevant because the so-called heat map 'allows you to find the hot spot instantly without needing to read numbers or understand concepts or specific units.' The what now? 'without needing to read numbers or understand concepts or specific units'.
I had to read it twice because the first time i couldn't believe it. Is this a serious program or a toy? One problem with that – the heat map 'allows you to find the (?) hot spot' – so i guess you do need to understand one concept, but without a key, or any reference point of any kind, i (some user) don't know what a 'hot spot' is! Does 'hot spot' refer to a process that is: 1. Very busy and that i should leave alone? Caught in a loop and requires terminating? Exceeds my personal expectations of resource usage?
Exceeds Microsoft's expectations of resource usage? WTF does it mean? I can't determine the definition of 'hot spot', either from reading this post, or using the TM itself, or searching the web (including The Elder Geek). I can only conclude that the definition of 'hot spot' is to be determined.by the user., possibly based on personal expectations (and btw, i got my expectations from reading The Elder Geek – recommended). 'Our telemetry data told us that it was very common for users to go to the process tab, sort by CPU or memory utilization, and then look for applications consuming more resources than expected.' Ok, so presumably these 'expectations' are now redundant, because the cool heat map 'allows you to monitor anomalies across multiple resources (network, disk, memory, and CPU utilization) all at the same time' So the heat map indicates anomalies? You mean like; slightly-anomalous, moderately-anomalous, very-anomalous and so anomalous your-computer-appears-hung-anomalous?
Oh, that's right – 'anomalie' is just another concept i don't need to understand! So having come to the new Task Manager without any knowledge of the relevant concepts or units involved, and without any interest in reading the multitude of numbers displayed (which to the user is just noise), it is nonetheless deciphered by the user that the colored bits must be a graded indicator of resource use per process, and that orange in particular means 'too much resources are being used', and, intervention is required. The problem is, the user is given no means of determining what hue indicates what degree of resource-use-anomalie. To make matters worse, even if the user does have some understanding of how the colors relate to anomalous resource use, Task Manager provides no basis for the user to determine what should be done about this (let alone why this should be the users problem at all), except for the ludicrous 'search the web' functionality. @Drewfus honestly, your bickering is becoming a nuisance. During the discourse about the Metro Design you at least tried to find valid points to support your arguments.
But how can someone go on about something as minor as the word 'hot spot' for so long? Your whole last post was completely unnecessary. I would very much appreciate it if you could contribute with constructive criticism instead of running down everything that MS does. @Ryan Haveson This new Task Manager is so much better than the old one. I value its simplicity with the fiewer details as much as the whole lot of information presented at a glance with the more details version. Dear Microsoft, we will find a way to get the old start menu back one way or another, if you give us an official option to do so you can at least pretend that you are listening to your customers. Remember the people who actually buy and use Windows?
Not the developers developers developers who can't wait to start selling useless javascript apps through your new start screen to the clueless people who live on Facebook. We the desktop users who buy and use your software don't want a full screen start menu obscuring our desktop, we want our start menu just the way it was in Windows7. 99% of desktop users don't have a touchscreen monit.
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