Have you rebooted your bloated fetal sac today?
Ex-Microsoft maverick takes us on a trip through vintage Task Manager code
Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has taken YouTube viewers deep into the source code for Windows Task Manager while debunking a distressing Icelandic sobriquet for Microsoft's flagship operating system. Plummer has already admitted to writing the stone-cold killer of processes for early versions of Windows. Still, a …
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Wednesday 4th October 2023 18:15 GMT aerogems
To be fair, the 16-bit versions of Windows would also crash a lot. Like, really, a lot. And during the early days of the 32-bit transition, a poorly behaved 16-bit app could bring down the entire OS because it meant bypassing all the memory protections that were the whole point of going 32-bit. I don't really remember OS 9 crashing a lot, but then it basically only had cooperative multi-tasking, so you could generally only do one thing at a time with it. It was a huge selling point of OS 8 that Apple finally added background printing. I still remember seeing OS 7.5 systems tied up for hours at a time while printing long documents to slow ass dot-matrix printers from around the Apple ][ days. Credit goes to the engineers that the printers still worked, but you could probably find a reasonably skilled typist who could put things out on a typerwriter faster than those things.
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Wednesday 4th October 2023 15:11 GMT Throatwarbler Mangrove
Not just me, then
One of the less pleasant elements of Windows 11 is, in my opinion, the recalcitrance of the Task Manager to take absolute control of the operating system and blow away hung processes as needed; instead, if the UI becomes unresponsive, Task Manager will either not appear at all or only appear partially. Just another of the many questionable choices made in Win11.
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Wednesday 4th October 2023 17:15 GMT Roland6
"… the approach I did take was valid for the day because it kept it both robust and small”
This approach is also valid today, for essential unilities.such as task manager/resource manage.
I’m uncertain what "Today I would use a lot more of the C++ language itself and the STL library” would actually bring other than an increase in size of executable and greater dependency on other components and thus less robust.
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Wednesday 11th October 2023 09:42 GMT richardcox13
Re: Why don't the numbers add up?
And if you look at Process Explorer (SysInternals) you'll see a different number again.
Short version: there are some choices made about what counts as a process's CPU time (eg. how Windows uses the currently executing thread's stack for interrupt handlers).
Also Task Manager rounds to integers, so a lot of cases where a thread uses (say) 0.1% CPU in an interval round to zero, but across 10 threads that adds up.
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Thursday 28th December 2023 17:00 GMT Uncle Ron
Localization
In the 1970's IBM tried to abandon it's stupid attachment to naming it's products (usually) 4 digit numbers, like 3480, 6670 and on and on. They named it's newest typewriter the "Etron." It wasn't much of an advancement in tech, but it was attractive looking and sturdy. All the marketing brochures and ads and all the rest were prepared and printed and distributed, and trademarks were registered all over the world. Announce day loomed. Then, someone had the bright idea to see if "Erton" was a word in some other language. Do a Google search and see what "Etron" means in French. The biggest scramble since an 18 wheeler full of eggs crashed on I-95 took place at IBM HQ.