Windows 8 Task Manager Revamped

CPU, dynamic, Feature 2, Memory, Operating System, Task Manager, UI - By admin on Thursday, September 29, 2011 - 10:35

Following consultation with users, Microsoft has totally revamped the Task Manager to make it more user-friendly and a lot more useful too.

Easy to Kill Apps

To start with they discovered that most people use Task Manager for one thing; to kill unresponsive apps. So when you open the new Task Manager you just get a simple list of the applications you are using, with the unresponsive app highlighted. To kill the task you simply hit the 'End Task' key. There are no more prompts to ask if you're sure; instead the app is ended there and then.

Simplified Names and Groupings

Microsoft also found that most users found the level of information provided by the Task Manager to be confusing, so they simplified it.

As already stated, when you first open Task Manager, all you see is a list of the current apps that are running. If you then click on 'More Details', you can see exactly what apps are running as well as background processes and windows operating system processes. Microsoft has now grouped these together so you can more easily see what is happening. They've also given all their processes more 'user-friendly' names so you stand a chance of understanding exactly what each background process does. And if you still need more information, they've made it easy for you to search the web to find out what each app does just by right clicking on it.

Indicator Warning Lights

The most impressive part of the new Task Manager, however, is the 'heat map'. When you click onto 'More Details' and get the list of currently running apps and processes, each app and process is heat coded so you can see which ones are using the most CPU power and memory. This way, if your system starts to slow down, you can easily see which apps to close to speed it up again. The heat map not only covers CPU and memory usage but also disk and network usage too.

But don't worry if you liked the old Task Manager, as many of these functions are still here as Ryan Haveson, group project manager of Microsoft's Improve your PC Team explained: "We explicitly set a goal to not remove functionality, but rather to augment, enhance, and improve."

It looks like they've done a good job.