MS Task Manager turns 30: Creator reveals how a 'very Unixy impulse' endured in Windows

As Microsoft's Task Manager celebrates three decades - and grapples with its modern tendency to leave orphaned processes behind - its creator has shared the story of how the much loved troubleshooting tool came to be. If the user needs a chisel, don't give them a Nerf bat Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, says his …

[Paul Herber]

Task Manager was my 101% fave Windows app.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Download Server 2003 R2 Service Pack 2 update. Extract THAT taskmgr.exe. And you will have the final "good" version back, with full support for 64 bit and a higher number of CPU cores than older versions. "Good" in quotes because: I miss the "command line" tab - and that's it, the only actual thing I miss.

[Anonymous Coward]

... I am not installing the Linux subsystem for windows just to be able to do 'top'. That's stupidity.

Either that, or I have been trolled.

[ChrisC]

"It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work."

And there, so neatly encapsulated in that one sentence, is the gulf of difference between not only MS of old and today, but of most software peddlers. Back in the good old days, software generally just let users do what they needed to do provided it was within the fundamental capabilities of the software itself, whereas these days, no matter how capable the software now is, I find myself now increasingly battling with it to let me do what I *know* it can do if only it'd expose that specific sub-mode of the UI to let me do it, or if only it'd stop trying to second-guess what I was trying to do and constantly get in the way by thinking it knows better than me.

This article, as well as the one from yesterday, really resonated with me. As a child of the 70s/80s, riding the wave of the home computing boom in the UK starting with the early 8-bit systems (ZX81, Spectrum, Beeb) then through the 16/32-bit era (Amiga, ST, Archimedes, Mac Classic) and into those early years of PCs moving out of the corporate environment into the home (Win3.1 onwards, plus a bit of OS/2 Warp), I've spent decades gaining experience of using a wide variety of systems all of which had at their heart a fundamental respect for the person sat in front of them, and a clear design ethos based around facilitating their ability to use the systems in whichever ways they so desired, no matter what the original intent of the design team might have been. Hence the myriad of games, demos and other bits of software which constantly pushed those systems to do things that impressed even the designers.

Today, sitting in front of a W10/11 PC with infinitely more raw potential than anything I've ever had access to before, yet which feels utterly stifling to use, I find myself increasingly longing for a return to those genuinely good old days when computing was still fun and exciting, and reading the words of someone who was a part of those times, is in a position to speak with some authority, and seems to have much the same opinion of the state of affairs these days, is both refreshing and depressing in equal measure, and I wonder how much more pain the average PC user will be willing to endure before there's a collective scream of "enough is ENOUGH!" and the pushback begins.

[heyrick]

I have a dinky little Asus machine that could barely manage Windows 10. After a few days, and having developed a complete and total hatred of Windows (my last Windows was XP), I dumped Linux Mint Cinnamon on a USB stick and booted it.

I had never used Linux before, so I kept booting off the USB stick as my main drive with the idea that if I screw it up I can just reimage it.

Well, after a month and a bit the drive failed - USB flash devices don't like being main filesystems, but my experiences with Linux up until that point meant that my mind was made up. I installed Linux over top of Windows. It's a Linux only machine and while it has its quirks (the sound randomly dies on me), the difference between that and Windows is astounding. It's pretty fast on low end hardware, it uses a lot less disc space so I have 20% free after installing a bunch of things including the Arduino IDE. But most of all it doesn't try to get in the way. It's not perfect, the auto-hiding scrollbars are a joke, they're like eight pixels wide. Yeah, I'm whinging about scrollbars because, well, that and the audio glitchy are the things that irk me day to day, and I'd put the audio down to some lame proprietary Intel shit so not exactly Linux's fault.

But, honestly, I'm never going back to Windows. Linux does all the stuff I wanted from a machine and without being anything like as annoying about it.

So as a person who still uses RISC OS from time to time and also remembers when computers worked for you rather than for some faceless corporation...allow me to gently nudge you in the direction of Linux. There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

[Steve Davies 3]

re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

Almost everything is better than the dystopia of Windows 11...

[Woodnag]

Re: re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

Win11 is fine, if you install an earlier pre-AI version (23H2 here) using an ISO that has been decrappified with tinybuilder11 first, and then you spend a day with WinaeroTweaker and other stuff getting it to do what you want, not what Redmond wants.

[Stuart Castle]

Re: re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

Part of me almost wishes they'd go back to shipping the OS on floppy disks, I should imagine the cost of shipping hundreds, if not thousands of floppies to a customer would make the vendor think twice about any bloat they add. Not to mention requiring the customer to sit there for the best part of a week swapping disks while installing.

OK, so that's not really practical, but I suspect with a little work, Microsoft could get Windows to a point were the install media is less than a gig.

But then I also wish they'd offer a paid option for Windows that disables most, if not all, the telemetry, or at least gives the user the option to opt in, with a detailed explanation as to what they are opting in to, what data is shared, with whom, and what they will do with it.

[heyrick]

Re: re: There is something better than the dystopia of Windows...

"or at least gives the user the option to opt in, with a detailed explanation as to what they are opting in to, what data is shared, with whom, and what they will do with it."

If you're on the right side of the ocean: Isn't that exactly what the GDPR says is supposed to happen?

[ChrisC]

Yeah, I do fire up a Linux VM from time to time to do some cross-platform testing work. However, as corporate policy dictates that our work PCs run W11, and as work makes up the lion's share of my weekly time in front of a PC, then whatever benefits I'd get from switching my own PC away from 11 would be minimal in their own right, and would then bring the added joy of incurring context switching every time I swapped between work and non-work. On top of that, as expecting the rest of the family to migrate away from Windows would be asking a lot, I still need to remain sufficiently experienced in administering Windows systems to be able to deal with any problems on theirs, so it feels as if leaving mine running Windows as well is the best compromise at present.

Maybe once I retire I'll be more inclined to make the switch at home, though as that's still a good few years away, maybe it'll be whatever crazy ideas MS decide to impose on us in the meantime which tips the balance. Or who knows, maybe someone in Windows HQ will read these articles, realise just how far from ideal Windows currently is, and set the wheels in motion to return us to the good old days. Well, we have to at least dream, even if it's a hopelessly optimistic dream, right?

[Richard 12]

Depending on what said family use their computers for, now-ish might be the time to migrate them.

If everything they do is either in the browser or has a Linux version (check their Steam library), then the current Microsoft push to "buy a new computer" when they don't really need to might be enough to convince them to try something else.

Worst case, they dislike it enough to buy a new computer. Best case, they save that money for something they actually want.

[John Brown (no body)]

"Yeah, I'm whinging about scrollbars because, well, that and the audio glitchy are the things that irk me day to day, and I'd put the audio down to some lame proprietary Intel shit so not exactly Linux's fault."

FWIW, I think it *is* Linux' fault. Well, the GUI designers and the underlying GUI toolkits designers. They copied from MS. It was MS who decided that window frames should be barely more than a pixel wide making hard to resize windows. And that scroll bars should be very narrow and disappear when the pointer is not hovering over them. They didn't have to copy MS and they didn't have to remove the users choice to set the widths to something the user feels is rational.

[bombastic bob]

fixing UI elements in Linux

depending on your desktop the fix for auto-hide and width is a setting and probably documented someplace that takes searching to find. I suggest grok,com, ask how to make the scrollbar wider and turn off autohide and give it the desktop and version and it'll tell you pretty explicitly

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: fixing UI elements in Linux

I just looked a bit harder, and for XFCE at least, it's adding some lines to a .css file which affect GTK based apps. It's NOT a setting directly available from any of the GUI settings options. In KDE, it depends on the theme, most likely you again end up changing a .css file which again only affects GTK apps.

Thanks for pointing me in a direction which helped, but it's still not as easy or obvious as it ought to be.

[theOtherJT]

Re: fixing UI elements in Linux

It's the biggest failing of the Linux desktop - namely, that there's no such thing as the Linux desktop. There are hundreds of the bloody things and they're all a bit different which makes certain things really hard to work out if the one you happen to be sat in front of isn't doing what you want. Maybe you can make it. Maybe you'd be better off with another desktop entirely. Maybe there is documentation. Maybe there isn't.

Sadly I don't think there's really a solution to this problem short of ceasing to care about the "Linux" desktop and start working toward the Canonical desktop, or the SteamOS desktop or the ChromeOS desktop... but which ever of those (or any other contender) we were to pick it'd upset someone and the whole tedious process of fragmentation would just start all over again.

[An_Old_Dog]

Flash Drives as Main File Systems

USB flash devices don't like being main filesystems

With two tricks, they'll work as main file systems just fine.

1. Configure your Linux/Unix with NO swap partition and no swapfile. That's right ... none.

2. Modify /etc/fstab so that your flash drive uses the "noatime" option. This drastically reduces file system writes, in exchange for loss of accurate "when was the last time someone touched this file?" information. (You still will have accurate information about when the file was last modified, and when the file was created.)

I ran my netbooks this way, with the "main file system" living on a 32GB flash memory card, and the /home/ and /tmp/ fileststems living on the netbook's 4GB solid-state drive.

[MyffyW]

No Swap

It is a real mindset change when coming to Linux from Windows. No Virtual Memory! What none?!

Yes, because if you're running out of physical RAM, you're going to get truly rotten performance. Far better to manage the use of the memory better - buy more or run less - than pretend swapping to disk is going to be anything less than painful.

[theOtherJT]

Re: No Swap

I believe you still need it for hibernation to work properly tho. Could be wrong.

[Rich 2]

Re: Flash Drives as Main File Systems

I’ve run my 16G laptop without any swap at all due the last 8 or so years.

Many people still think this is heresy but I’ve never encountered a single issue. In my head, swap is an an anachronism on modern hardware with gobs of memory. If I ever run out of memory then something has gone very wrong anyway.

Also, re running from a flash drive, make sure /tmp is moved to RAM. I also redirect some stuff in /var to the (RAM-based) /tmp and also move the cache and other crap that Firefox writes to constantly to /tmp

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Flash Drives as Main File Systems

@ TheOtherOne JT:

A good point. I never use(d) hibernation; on Linux it does use the swap partition (or swapfile?).

I suggest testing to see if hibernation works with an initialised swap partition, where the swapping has been shut off after that initialsation.

@Rich 2:

I've never had anything bad happen to my Linux/Unix systems which had all swapping turned off, even on netbooks with just 2GB RAM.

I have needed-and-used disc-based swapping turned on, on aome old laptops with just 128 MB RAM.

[LionelB]

"my job is to just fix things and get out of the way".

I guess there's been a vacancy there the past 30 years. Where do I apply?

[frankvw]

"...I find myself increasingly longing for a return to those genuinely good old days when computing was still fun and exciting, and reading the words of someone who was a part of those times...

Those words point at the way leading to that return, my friend. I myself followed that "Unixy impulse" over two decades ago and never looked back.

[David Hicklin]

Windows Tech Edition is what we are looking for, ordinary consumers can keep the home version.

[heyrick]

It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

Something so woefully missing today when it's all too normal to interrupt your workflow to show you an adverts. Maybe someday soon your desktop will be just like the mobile "experience" where it's just accepted that everything will periodically halt in order that you can watch that stupid shouty Temu advert for the tenth time...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

Maybe someday soon your desktop will be just like the mobile "experience"

Mine won't. Neither will yours if you choose to take control.

[ChrisC]

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

As someone who has to suffer W11 in a corporate environment, I don't get interrupted by adverts, but I do regularly get interrupted by the even more annoying way that Office is now designed to treat even a few femtoseconds-worth of inactivity as a sign you're no longer *really* focused on whatever you were doing in Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams etc. etc., and that it's therefore *entirely* acceptable for the Office Update system to suddenly, without any forewarning, opportunities to defer to a later point in time, or even any sort of feedback to at least let you know what it's doing, close down the app you were literally just using in order to apply whatever update it's deemed so utterly essential to the survival of the known universe, that it simply HAS to be applied without any further ado.

Honestly, given a choice between having to watch an ad, where I at least *knew* that the system was deliberately preventing me from doing anything for that period of time, or having to sit twiddling my thumbs for an entirely unknown period of time not being entirely certain that Word etc. has suddenly closed down to perform an update, or if it's done so for some other reason, and having to then just wait patiently without any knowledge as to how long that wait will be, before things start up again, allow me to gather my train of thought again and resume whatever it was I was doing before the system so rudely interrupted my work, then I'd choose ads. And as someone who utterly despises online advertising and quashes it wherever possible, that should tell you all you need to know as to how utterly and completely user-hostile I now consider Office Update to be. How anyone at MS could look at the implementation and go "yeah, that's a perfectly acceptable way for us to treat users" beggars belief, yet here we are.

[David Hicklin]

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

> W11 in a corporate environment

I managed to retire a few weeks before I was going to get a w11 one so have no corporate experience of it but at my last $work they had an update manager that would give you several hours warning that updates had to be applied rather than just doing them, and we could defer them (up to a point) or apply now.

The only pain was logging out on a Thursday afternoon (my weekend started then) to go home and having a monthly update start and you are still plugged into the docking station....

[Falmor]

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

For me the interruptions are either Wizards telling me about new features I don't want to use, or surveys asking how likely I am to recommend the product.

[that one in the corner]

It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

The User does *not* want to "experience" your software.

The only good UX is "I never noticed it".

[Dwarf]

Re: It's the habit of assuming that the user is trying to accomplish some real work

It doesn't seem to matter to Microsoft that most peoples experience in Windows is precluded by the word "bad"

[Rich 2]

85k

Can you imagine a current version of task manager (whether on windows, Linux, whatever) being 85k in size?

More like 85M. Plus the 300MB of dependency libraries needed to make it work

Modern software is (often) shite

[Ken Hagan]

Re: 85k

Task Manager today is 5½ MB, so you've exaggerated but the basic point is valid.

Judging the dependencies fairly is harder since you might need only a single function from an enormous DLL.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: 85k

Agreed, dependencies can be misleading when looking at the total resource requirements of an app. If the library is huge and your app only uses one small function from it AND the library is only needed for your app, then yes, that's a lot of wasted resources. On the other hand, if that library is in RAM anyway because lots of other stuff also requires it, then it's not an immediate resource hog of just that one app.

[Roland6]

Re: 85k

Given the purpose of Taskmanager, I would expect it to have zero dependencies to deliver any core functionality.

[Eric 9001]

Re: 85k

nice from GNU is 43K

kill from procps is 27K

But you kind of also need ps from procps (131K) and GNU grep (167K) to be able to find what is running and what PIDs to nice or kill.

So it's only ~368K for a task manager on GNU (there is a speed/size tradeoff and disks and RAM are now large enough that it's usually not worth the effort to make things smaller than that), although that does not include dependencies (not too large) or GNU Bash (932K) or the terminal emulator needed to run the software.

[RobThBay]

Blow main tanks

...had the architecture to surface that information...

Does a klaxon go off when you decide to surface?

[bombastic bob]

Re: Blow main tanks

remember, it's 2 blasts on the klaxon then "Dive, Dive", and 3 blasts then "Surface, surface, surface". Sometimes people get those backwards [even in old movies you see it].

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

Microsoft shipping beta code?!

[Fruit and Nutcase]

These days, it's more like Alpha code - ship it and let the marks[Windows Insiders] check it out

[Eric 9001]

Then when the bug reports from the windows insiders come in

Ignore them and ship it anyway.

[Notas Badoff]

And here I am, watching 108% system idle pop up in Task Manager again and again (Win11). Or is that because I'm reading ElReg and PC is thus "extra idle"?

[whitepines]

Do you have more than one CPU core? Two cores fully loaded might be 200%, four 400%, and so on. Odd way to do things but Windows is odd all around so?

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Your system is just looking on the bright side of life.

[David Hicklin]

I have never seen task manager (up to w10 admittedly) above 100%

SCOM monitoring on CPU usage on servers however used to add up each core which was fun on applications that had high CPU peaks. I think they fixed it eventually but 2008/2012 did suffer from it

[Bebu sa Ware]

"a very Unixy impulse"

One might have hoped Windows had followed UNIX^® and also faded into obscurity. ;)

_{Note the UNIX v. Unix.}

[frankvw]

Plummer didn't see preventing user choices as his responsibility...

How a man burdened with such a sensible attitude attitude, and such an uncommon amount of supposedly common sense, managed to survive so long within Microsoft's corporate culture, I will never know. Dave, have one on me!

[[e-mail]]

This guy gets credit for putting his home number in the code, but when I put the account manager's number in some code I wrote for a client people got all uppity about it!