Figured I should write this stuff down before I forget it all, and where better for TaskManager than r/techsupport! If there’s any appetite for this, I’ll expand on it! I don’t blog, so here goes…

[TLDR? See also Dave’s Task Manager’s History on YouTube ]

Some Task Manager lore: I’m the Microsoft (Redmond, ’93) developer that wrote TaskMgr at home in my den in about 1994 and then the NT silverback devs let me check it into the main tree even though I was a greenhorn at the time. So that meant I got to bring it into work and polish it up and make it an official part of Windows, where it remains to this day. So I got to define my own day job, actually, which was nice! I don’t know if it’s still like that, but great culture and people.

This is all based on XP, as I left long ago, but it’s still the same core app underneath. In no particular order:

– If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc. Winlogon will look for an existing instance and try to revive it for up to 10 seconds. If the old Taskmgr doesn’t start making sense by responding with a secret code within that time, another one will be launched. That way, you’re never without a Taskmgr as long as there are some resources available.

– Task Manager will load in reduced mode if resources are short, like only loading the Processes page if that’s what’s needed to get going. It’s one of the very few apps that won’t just “fail and bail” when things go wrong.

– If Task Manager ever becomes internally corrupted,