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Welcome to HelpDesk TV. My name is Rudy Stebih.
The Windows Task Manager is one Windows feature which hasn’t seen a lot of improvement and
additions in a long time. Despite being a complete rewrite of the Windows 7 Task Manager,
Windows 8 Task Manager classifies the Windows tasks related information into separate groups,
which help users easily navigate through user and system initiated processes. For example,
one of the features of the Windows 8 Taskbar is the auto-classification of processes into
Applications, Background processes, and Windows process categories; these categories reduce
significant amount of time that users would have spent finding threads of certain applications.
When you launch the Task manager from the taskbar, it shows only those desktop and Metro
applications which are currently running to start with. You can right-click the active
application to end all related processes, create a dump file, view properties, open
its location in Windows Explorer, and initiate a web search to get detailed information about
the application.
Clicking the More details toggle button will reveal the extended Windows 8 Task manager.
The extended view includes the Processes, Performance, App History, Startup, Users,
Details, and Services tabs. The Processes tab groups threads by aforementioned categories.
You can also access options for application related processes via the right-click context
menu from the Applications group. It includes an extra option, named Details which takes
you to the Details tab to check all related threads.
The Performance tab has been revitalized with dynamic line graphs, showing detailed information
about CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network/Ethernet/Wifi usage. Underneath the graph window, it shows
extra information about selected system elements such as CPU, Memory, Disk, or Network. For
instance, when Memory is selected, it will display total memory in use, available, committed,
cached, paged pool, and non-paged pool memory use.
The App history tab is a great new addition to the Windows Task Manager. It maintains
a list of applications you launched during a session, so that you can easily switch to
any previously used application, and view its CPU and Network usage. The Delete usage
history will clear the usage statistics, letting you record application usage history from
scratch.
Under the Startup and Users tabs, you can manage applications and processes which start
when Windows starts, and view, disconnect and log off currently logged in users, respectively.
The Details tab of Windows 8 Task Manager looks quite similar to the Processes tab of
Windows 7. Here, you will find a collection of all user and system initiated processes
with information like User name, CPU usage, Memory working set, and process description.
From the right-click context menu, you will be able to end task and end process tree,
create a dump file, set CPU priority level and CPU affinity of a selected application,
analyze the wait chain, which is responsible for showing which processes are using or waiting
to use an already busy resource, search process details online, enable/disable UAC virtualization,
switch to a respective service in the Services tab, and view selected process properties.
The Services tab lists down all the active and passive Windows services. It shows Process
ID, service description, status and Group, while allowing users to quickly stop a running
service, restart it, open Services console, and view related processes in the Details
tab from the right-click context menu.
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