Edit: dumb that using the shortcut to open the task manager doesn’t interrupt the system. That’s what ctrl-alt-del did before windows 8 or whenever, open the task manager regardless of what was happening. Now I have to use that annoying lock-screen menu to open the task manager to kill processes if things are locked up. Didn’t know that, horribly unintuitive
If your computer is locked up, you have to use ctrl-alt-del, with its menu of options including the task manager, in order to interrupt the current processes locking up the system.
Using ctrl-shift-esc launches the task manager program without a system interrupt, meaning it won’t unlock the computer. Which is dumb, because why else would I be opening the task manager other than to interrupt some out-of-control process? I guess you could be using it to monitor or something else, but that’s what I’m used to opening the task manager to be doing. I didn’t even realize this until this comment.
then just press ctrl alt del if you want a system interrupt??? there’s a reason they have bindings for both. it’s not much harder, the task manager doesn’t exist solely for killing some program that won’t respond.
I assume this terminology originally referred to an actual interrupt handled by a kernel interrupt handler, and half of the people in this thread have no idea what that means.
I have totally caught malware checking to see if task manager is running, and cooling it until it is closed. Some cryptocurrency mining trojans do this. You can verify it by using a tool other than task manager, e.g. System Explorer or Process Hacker. Usually they’re not smart enough to poll for third party tools, so they’ll quiet down when only task manager is opened and not when you’re using any third party tools.
The one thing they’re missing, which honestly shouldn’t happen on at least desktop distros, is the system becoming unresponsive under memory pressure because before the kernel decides to kill off anything it rather swaps its own data structures out to disk, grinding everything to such a crawl that it’s indistinguishable from a complete freeze.
The solution is early OOM, which is more aggressive at killing things off and it honestly should be installed and activated by default.
Remember how Volkswagen got in trouble a few years back for faking emissions when the car detected it was being tested. It would interesting to see if something like that could exist with RAM and task manager.
It definitely can for the graphics card. I got a trojan one time that was mining crypto using 100% of the gpu causing it to heat up and blow the fan like crazy, and it stopped every time I opened the task manager.
That’s actually a pretty good idea, although it’s not like a right-click on the desktop is really that much slower (assuming we’re taking about Windows)
Yeah, windows task manager doesn’t do shit if you are already low on resources. My desktop doesn’t have a lot of resources to be used up and there have been a few times task manager is just as bad as the programs I want it to kill due to lack of resources.
It will very gladly show you all the resources are being consumed by some service you don’t need, can’t uninstall or disable, and will just consume more resources by restarting if you terminate the process.
Ah, yes, I’d love to disable core components of windows that are using 100% disk. I’d loose the pointer? Great! Explorer? Fantastic! The file indexer? I didn’t need files anyway!
Had a beast of a desktop machine back in 2000, it could even decode DVD real-time. But sometimes DVD playback would hang. Pushing the power button 5s would switch off the machine, but 3-4s would get DVD playback working again.
That’s how I learned that the road to success is to bully and intimidate… At least your hardware
Back in the 00s, when you told Windows to sort a big directory by modified date or so it would take ages, but be faster when you scrolled up and down. That’s still the case. Presumably that’s because explorer will launch more concurrent “get file metadata” tasks. Overall it’s still slow, though.
It’s actually not NTFS’s fault, but explorer: Nushell gets file metadata in at most 1/100th of the time (the sorting itself is negligible), Linux is still faster at handling NTFS than windows even then, though, nushell on windows is merely fast enough to not be annoying.
As the fifth person to say that, I think the author may have baited you into writing this. It’s sinilar to when someone misspells a word in the title of a TikTok video, as tons of well meaning people will comment on the error, thus generating attention.
what i really want, what i really need, is just a windows equivalent to xkill. window not responding? ctrl+alt+esc, click. it’s dead along with its entire family.
Yeah, I hate how multi-process apps never really show their memory usage very well anymore in Task Manager. Been using Process Explorer since before Russinovich sold to Microsoft and it’s easily been the best one I’ve used on Windows to get a better picture of what is going wrong.
I am still convince that soon or after they will discover an hidden function in Windows that overclock briefly every component when task manager is opened
I’m pretty sure CTRL+ALT+DEL used to be the task manager shortcut, but around 7 or 8 a menu was added with logout and shutdown options. I don’t know how long CTRL+SHIFT+ESC has been a thing, but it’s an effective replacement (and easier to press with one hand :] ).
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