Users of Microsoft’s upcoming flagship operating system Windows 8 may soon have an easier time managing running applications —or killing misbehaving ones, with an overhauled Task Manager. Ryan Haveson, the group program manager of our “In Control of Your PC team," said Task Manager has been simplified, with an option to show more details and with a heat map that shows which apps or processes may be wasting resources. “We made it more streamlined for mainstream users, and more detailed for power users," Haveson said in a blog post. Haveson noted people who use Task Manager spend most of their time in the tabs around views of applications and processes. People using the process tab were looking for something that was not on the applications list such as a background or system process; or to see which processes were using the most resources, he added. Another finding was that the most common usage of the tool was to simply end or “kill" an application or a process. With these findings, Haveson said they had three goals in rebuilding the Task Manager:
- Optimize Task Manager for the most common scenarios, to use the applications tab to find and close a specific application, or go to the processes tab, sort on resource usage, and kill some processes to reclaim resources.
- Use modern information design to achieve functional goals.
- Don’t remove functionality.
Haveson said the default view has a minimalist experience that appeals to the needs of the “broadest customer base and most common scenario." “We made the default view great at one thing: killing misbehaving apps. And we removed everything that did not directly support that core scenario," he said.
'More details' view The bulk of changes in Task Manager are in the “More details" view, which Haveson said is the realm of the power user. In the new “More Details" view, the Processes tab contains columns for Process, Status, CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network. “Content in columns is shaded different colors to indicate the highest numbers for each item," he said.
Heat map feature The new heat map shows which applications and processes may be consuming more resources than expected. It allows a user to monitor anomalies across multiple resources (network, disk, memory, and CPU utilization) all at the same time, without having to sort the data. “It also allows you to find the hot spot instantly without needing to read numbers or understand concepts or specific units," he said. Haveson said that when a particular resource is being used at a rate above a threshold number, the column header will light up to draw the user’s attention. “Think of this as a warning indicator, letting you know a good place to start looking if you are experiencing performance issues," he said.
Grouping by apps, processes Haveson said a big challenge with the Task Manager is that it is hard to know which processes correspond to:
- an application (generally safe to kill)
- Windows OS processes (which can cause a blue screen if killed)
- miscellaneous background processes
The new Task Manager shows processes grouped by type, so it is easy to keep these separated. On the other hand, it also integrates a search context menu on right-click, so one can go directly to his or her default search engine to see more details and relevant information about a process. “This can make a huge difference when deciding whether a background process is doing something useful or just wasting cycles," he said.
— TJD, GMA News 
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