Microsoft Discusses Overhauled Task Manager in Windows 8

[Rob Williams]

Either by necessity or interest, many Windows users find themselves staring the Task Manager in the face on a regular occasion. It could be that a program has stalled or that you simply want to know where your network resources are being hogged. The Task Manager has always proven to be a good one-stop shop for such information, and not surprisingly, it's a key aspect of Windows that's seeing an overhaul in 8.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[marfig]

It does look great indeed. A couple of other things I also found excellent:

- We will now be able to finally see a breakdown of each svchost.exe entry on the task manager. No more hunting down PIDs on the services tab.

- Friendly names for processes and services. Essentially what they have done is to make the Image Name column of the current Task Manager optional, and turn the Description column as the default one. This is really something we can do on the current Task Manager by enabling the Description column and then moving it all the way to the left. But with the addition of application and process icons, this really makes looking anything up in Task Manager much easier to do.

- Break down of windows associated with a process. Leads to a much, much, more organized display and can facilitate the killing of a main process.

 

[Rob Williams]

Ahh, I didn't notice the break-down of individual services like that. That's awesome. I appreciate the fact that they are finally splitting up svchost.exe and making it easier to understand. I always found it ridiculous that you'd have 20 svchost.exe's in your list and had to spend minutes figuring out which one was acting up. Half the time it's just easier to reboot.

 

[Kougar]

Rob, exactly. This was exceedingly long overdue... Quite a few other good updates with this one too!