All of the Win 8 reviews I’ve seen focus on the new GUI, and on how, like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, the old GUI and the new GUI live uncomfortably together.
There are a few little gems hidden in the old GUI part of Win 8, and I’m celebrating the new task manager in this post. The old task manager was certainly serviceable, but it didn’t provide you with a lot of information. You could always start the resource monitor, but for many things that seemed like trying to kill a fly with a hammer.
The new task manger integrates much of the information that you formerly had to go to the resource monitor to get, and it does it in an intuitive, even deft, way.
For example, the processes tab of the task manager used to look like this:
You could see and sort on CPU and memory usage, which was useful, but not on some other important items. The new processes tab looks like this:
Now you can see and sort on disk and network traffic as well — really nice when you’re trying to figure out why your computer is running slow. And take a look at the color coding, which makes it really easy to find the big offenders even without sorting.
The old performance tab looked like this:
Lots of information about the CPU, including individual core usage, but missing the disk and network information. The new performance tab drops the core usage data, but gives you the rest, and a lot more besides.
No longer do you have to invoke msconfig to see startup programs:
Any you don’t have to be Johnny on the spot to catch an app hogging a resource; there’s an historical summary of usage — also color coded — and you can sort by clicking on the column names:
It’s a big improvement. Not worth upgrading for all by itself, but for me it was a nice surprise. I miss it whenever I work on a Win 7 machine.
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