Hands-On Windows 211 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at a new task manager and it didn't come from Microsoft. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott. And this week I'm going to look at a pretty special app. So this is not something that comes in Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:28]:
Um, instead it was made by a former Windows NT engineer, a former Microsoft engineer named Dave Plummer. You may know of him. He has a great YouTube channel called Dave's Garage that I subscribe to. And he's been doing a lot of, um, local AI and just AI in general, vibe coding, all kinds of things in recent years. But, um, he's famous for all kinds of reasons. And by the way, he did a 3-hour interview with NT Architect. Dave Cutler, that should not be missed. I'm sure it's somewhere up here near the top.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:02]:
Well, it isn't actually, but it should be. It's like one of the best videos I've ever seen. But, um, when he was working at Microsoft back in the 1990s, he created Task Manager, right? This interface that still exists today, um, in Windows 11, right? Um, he also did other things. I mean, he, uh, all kinds of other things, but, um, he's worth looking up. He's, uh, really knowledgeable, super interesting. Um, and if you're familiar with Task Manager in Windows 11, I'll just bring it up here. Uh, we've talked about this fairly recently. This comes up in terms of multitasking oftentimes, um, for various reasons, but, uh, over the years it hasn't changed too, too much.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:43]:
In Windows 11, it has this kind of modern look and feel, which is fine. It has the same basic tabs and pages and so forth. Um, I use this personally most often to manage which apps run at startup, right? We've talked about this kind of thing. There are other ways to do this, but I think the most common usage is to go in here when something's going wrong. So your computer has slowed down, perhaps it's, you know, something's just not quite right, and you can take a look at what is consuming the most resources in terms of here CPU, memory, and disk. And usually in here you'll see, you know, Microsoft Edge with probably a single tab, maybe 2 tabs actually, is using as much RAM as Helium, which is a Chrome, Chromium-based browser. Which has multiple tabs open, so whatever. But these are the typical criminals for memory usage, right? Chromium-based web browsers, and then whatever else I have running on the system.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:38]:
But the other— actually, the other change here, then you won't be able to see anything here— is on this Memory tab. Microsoft in recent years has added an NPU view, right? So if you have any local AI running that hits the NPU, that will pop up here. So, um, that's pretty much it. I mean, it's, it's, you know, little, uh, little small things here and there, but for the most part, the same app that's been in Windows for almost 30 years, right? So it's, it's kind of interesting. Um, but, uh, Dave Plummer. So Dave Plummer has created a new Task Manager that he calls TMOG, or Task Manager OG, like original generation. And this one's really interesting. So It is a modern take on Task Manager.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:21]:
We'll look at it in a moment. It is, uh, vibe-coded, so we used AI to create this thing. It runs natively, so it's not like a web shell or any kind of, you know, weird thing that kind of works everywhere. It's native on each platform. It runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows, unlike the original one, which of course only, uh, ran on Windows. Um, it's also a freemium app. So the stuff that's in Task Manager today and some of the other common, I'd say, Windows system utilities that are still available in Windows. His version of those things are free.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:52]:
If you want to get additional functionality, you can pay him, you know, $40. You can run on 3 different computers. It doesn't matter which platform, that kind of thing. So we'll take a look at all that as we go. But let me just fire this thing up. Actually, I think it's already running. Yes. So this Task Manager, and here is Task Manager OG or TM OG, right? So I've had this running since just before we started the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:16]:
And this default view is something that you do not see in Task Manager. And I don't mean just the style of the presentation, which has got this kind of not quite cyberpunk, but kind of a— I don't know what to call this. It's kind of a cool looking thing. But this is one example of something that you don't get in Task Manager, which is just kind of an all-up dashboard type view, right? And so I could see a lot of technical users especially kind of throwing this on a second monitor And just leaving it on for entertainment. It's just kind of cool looking, right? Um, but there is a lot more going on with this app. TMOG, it's the new Task Manager. I'm running in dark mode. I have to kind of do that for the video recording or whatever, but it looks great in light mode as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:57]:
Um, you've got the sidebar over here with a bunch of different views. Uh, the top several above this pro bar mostly map to things we see in Task Manager, right? Um, so if we look at tasks, the Windows 11 version of Task Manager. There's no summary view. You don't get that dashboard. There's also no system info view, right? And that's because system information is a separate control panel in Windows that's been around also forever. I'll just bring that guy up here. And so he has brought information from that utility into his version of Task Manager. But on this kind of all-up dashboard, you can kind of see just a high-level view of everything you've got.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:36]:
I'm connected to Ethernet in this case. If I wasn't, there would be a Wi-Fi box there. I'm not using the GPU at all, which is interesting because I'm actually recording video. But okay, you've got a measurement of the clock speed of the CPU, which is 4.1 gig, which is pretty high. I think this particular chip probably goes maybe up to 5 gigahertz, but the base clock speed is 1.9 gigahertz. So it's, it's working right. And you can kind of see that here as well. So this is kind of a cherry-picked selection of views that you'll see throughout the app elsewhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:09]:
So we move on to performance, and I'll just keep bringing this back so you can kind of see the difference. So in the original Task Manager, the Windows 11 Task Manager, Processes is the default view. We'll get to that in a moment, but Performance is the second view. That is true here as well. I mentioned that, you know, NPU, CPU view, et cetera, also memory, disk, networking. It could be Ethernet or Wi-Fi. And GPU as well. And so this is, you can see this is a much more, of course I'm hiding it, but a much more dynamic looking display.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:42]:
It's really kind of cool. It's good. It's got fun graphics and all that kind of stuff. But there's some stuff going on here. Like for example, this is a multi-core, so it's got 16 cores altogether. I don't know how they're spread out exactly. It varies by processor. This is an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake type processors, modern, very powerful.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
But you can see it here, what he is doing is showing you a view of each of the— these are CPU cores, logical processors, but cores as the default view. You can go to the All CPUs Combined view, which is a lot like what we see in the normal Task Manager, right? That is kind of his version of this. And then you can also see efficiency versus performance. So these are 2 of the types of cores that are in this processor. I actually think this type of processor supports a 3rd core type, which is low power efficiency. But just to give you an idea of the relative usage of each of those cores inside the processor. But I kind of like the default view. It's just— whoops— which is this one, which is really cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:47]:
So there's that. And you can do the same kind of view for a lot of this sort of system resources that you have. A couple of these things support subviews as well. So if you go to memory, nothing. It's just memory utilization. This is an awfully flat kind of graph, but okay. But if I go to graphics here, here you can see, I think this is actually the default view, is this more standard view where you can see like processor, or in this case, I should say graphics processor utilization, you know, shared GPU memory, 'cause that's what that is, it's integrated graphics. But if you go to engines, this is a little bit like the core view that you see in the CPU page, which, but not broken down by literal cores, but rather by— sub-engines, which are basically cores for the Arc GPU, which is an integrated graphics that Intel makes.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:34]:
It's actually kind of fantastic. So you can kind of see here, this is some of the 3D, the 3D engine part of it is being utilized right now, probably from the screen recording. And then these other things are not really being used at all because I'm just not doing much else, right? I'm just looking at this thing and we're recording the video, but There isn't much else going on. And then Processes, like I said, this is very similar to that default view that you see in the normal Task Manager. The one thing I've seen here, by the way, that does not work for some reason, and this is possibly the only little regression that I've noticed, but I could be missing something. Maybe there's a different keyboard shortcut. One of the nice things about Task Manager is these things will change. You can see the values changing.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:18]:
I'm pointing at the screen like you can see my finger. You can see the values changing here for whatever reason. Just memory. Utilizations going up or down or whatever. If you hold down the Control key, you can actually pause that from refreshing, which is super helpful if you want to come over here and kill a task, right? This one, Dave's version of this, when I hold down the Control key, nothing happens. So this, there might be a way, I might just be missing it. But you can see this thing is kind of spastically moving around. But it gives you a very dynamic and live view, as you would think, of what's going on with the different processes running on your computer.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:53]:
System Info, like I said, not part of Task Manager in Windows 11, but these are the same basic data points you would see in that System Information Control Panel. So it's kind of nice to actually have that in one place. App History works as it does in Task Manager, but with one exception, right? You can see it says Restart as Administrator. So I could have run this as admin and I wouldn't have seen this, but when you run Task Manager Depending on the situation, you might have to go through a User Account Control dialog for authentication, or well, for privilege escalation actually. This one just runs as a standard user for the most part, but if you want to access this view, you actually do have to go through that little restart there, or just start it as an admin, run the whole thing as an admin, which maybe is not the greatest idea. This is what it sounds like. This is a history of resource utilization over time. I believe you can't really tell here, but I think it's sorted by, let me go to the top here.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:53]:
Yeah. By CPU time. Right. So this is something interesting to me because when I look at this in, did I get rid of it? I think I got rid of it. Um, I compulsively close things. So when I look at this here and I sort this by CPU time, if I can do this correctly, that hasn't been running long enough, but You often see this kind of SVC host. So service host, service host is just something in Windows that runs as a— well, it is a container that runs other executables within it. So sometimes when you see an SVC host, you can't really tell what that thing actually represents because there's something inside of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:35]:
And this thing can often be the top utilized— I guess it's an app. It's not technically an app, but an executable certainly in the system, which is kind of useless information, right? Um, and so you do see those in here, but I've noticed in his, for whatever reason, he does a better job of calling out, um, things that are actually standalone apps. Although now I'm looking at this, I see, I do see a bunch of these things in here. So chrome.exe is not actually Chrome in my case, it's Helium because Helium hides itself and makes it look like Chrome, but it's, you know, essentially Chrome. So it's a Chrome web browser or whatever. Um, so this is useful, you know, and then we, these, these views again, it's very much like what we see in Task Manager. So startup apps is where you go to determine which apps run at startup. Startup.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:18]:
You can disable them, enable them, and so forth. You can sort these by name, which I think is the default actually. I always sort this by enabled or disabled so I can quickly see all of the things that are enabled to run at startup together and then make that decision very easily. So that's kind of cool. It works the same way, you know, as it does in Task Manager. And then we have the user view, which on my computer doesn't mean much because I should be the only user. And this is only useful if you are— well, it's mostly useful if you're running multiple users. And so you could have someone who's logged in but not the active user, and you can see if something is over there screwing things up, and then you could go kill it if you had to, that kind of thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:56]:
So that works the same. And then there's also this service view. This one is one of the— this is kind of a weird outlier because there is a services view here. You can see very quickly this has all— shows a lot more services, and this kind of maps to the there's a services— it's actually a Microsoft Management Console, but we'll just call it a control panel essentially, which is— these should map to exactly the same thing. So you should see the same things here. They're sorted— well, let me go back to the top. Yeah, so you can see— you can— well, you can't really see, then they're not really exactly the same, but they should be roughly the same. And this is a combination of services that are currently running and services that could run at any time but maybe come on and off.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:44]:
you know, as they go. You can go in here and look at them and determine whether or not, for example, this thing runs at startup or whatever, that type of thing. This view is, is kind of, it's just kind of strangely formatted. Like, I don't know quite why, like he, there's plenty of room, but I guess, I guess he's saving space just to have this on the bottom. I don't know why that couldn't be a little different, but, but basically the same thing, right? And then You also get this deal where you can sort by running, which I really like, which is super helpful. So useful, perhaps, you know, I don't know. Everything below the line here is, is paid. So if you go in there, I've— I— he actually did give me a key, which I've not applied on this computer, but you can go and click on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:30]:
And of course, that opened in a different web browser, but I'll just bring that over here so you can see it real quick. This is his website for this. Sorry, let me just maximize that. So it's, you know, $40 in the US. Like I said, 3 computers at once, any mix of whatever platforms, and it gives you access to these kind of secondary, you know, power tools. But you can get a kind of an idea of what's going on here, right? And so this basically looks at all of the sensors that are inside the computer, some of which are going to be inside of, you know, storage or processors, you know, whatever, which is kind of interesting. This kind of a way to capture what's going on in the system. Typically, if you think about it, you know, using your computer, things aren't working very well, and you want to go and look, and this does a better job of providing that live immediate view than normal Task Manager in the sense that what you want to see is like What is causing this? But if you keep having problems over time, you could run this recorder and just kind of capture what's going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:38]:
So you could run things and see how they impact things and so forth. Kind of a connection view, which is scary, by the way. You can see where these things go and like what's going on in your system. You know, sitting here now, for example, I don't use Outlook at all, but there it is. Oh, actually, this is a sample. I'm sorry. Never mind. But you will see things in here that are wait, what's this thing? And this gives you a nice view of what's running on the system, um, some of which may surprise you, right? So it's kind of a nice thing, uh, just to take a look at.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:09]:
Um, and then installed apps, drivers, and, uh, disk space. So just, you know, just additional stuff. This is a really cool 3D view. Um, it's not really 3D, but it's got that kind of 3D effect. Um, anyone who's used any of the disk space utilities out there has probably seen one of those things where like they, you know, the biggest files are giant Usually they're squares or rectangles. So he uses kind of a circular pattern here, which actually I think is really cool. So, and then benchmarks. So you can run benchmarks against CPU, GPU, disk, and your internet speed, and then get a score that you can then compare to others in the community of people who bought this app.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:44]:
So basically a superset, right, of the standard Task Manager. I think it has a much prettier interface depending on how you like, you know, your subjective view of things. think it's that pretty, but I think it's really cool. And like I said, if you have multiple monitors and you're, you know, you like to have that kind of dashboard style view, this is, it's really cool for that kind of thing. So, um, if you want to find out more about this, you can go to, let me see, I brought this over here. It's, uh, tmog.org. So the, or I'm sorry, Task Manager OG org, right? And, uh, you can download it, um, from here, right? For any platform. So macOS, Linux, or Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:22]:
So there you go. Thank you, Dave. Thank you to everybody for watching. Um, I hope you found this useful. I think this is a really cool app. I hopefully some of you will give this thing a shot. Um, we'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can learn out more about the podcast at twit.tv/how.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:40]:
Uh, again, thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members.