Hands-On Windows 211: Task Manager OG

I'm Paul Throt, and this week I'm gonna look at a pretty special app.

So this is not something that comes in Windows 11.

Um, instead it was made by a former, uh, Windows NT engineer, a former Microsoft engineer, Dave, uh, named Dave Plummer.

You may know of him.

He has a, 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 three-hour interview with, um, NT architect Dave Cutler that should not be missed.

I'm sure it's somewhere up here near the top.

Well, it isn't actually, but it should be.

[laughs] 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, re- 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.

In Windows 11 it has this kind of modern look and feel, which is fine.

It has ba- s- 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.

Um, there are other ways to do this.

Um, 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, c- Microsoft Edge with probably a single tab, maybe two tabs actually, uh, is using as much RAM as Helium, which is a Chrome, Chromium-based browser, which, um, has multiple tabs open, [laughs] so whatever.