25 years later, Task Manager's creator shares a bunch of cool tips for using it

Task Manager
(Image credit: Future)

I don't really think about Task Manager much, despite it being the ultra-reliable super shotgun of desktop utilities. When a program or game is misbehaving or unresponsive but still running, Task Manager can coldly and efficiently deliver a killshot to its zombie brain.

End task... with extreme prejudice.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up Task Manager is a motion firmly ingrained in every PC user's muscle memory, and in addition to murdering malfunctioning programs it's useful for monitoring performance and CPU load, displaying every process that's running on your PC, listing logged-in users and what programs start up with your PC, and lots of other helpful services. And it's been a part of Windows for ages.

The creator of Task Manager (and Space Cadet Pinball to boot), David Plummer, posted on Reddit this week with a few cool tips and tricks I'd never seen before (though admittedly I never really looked for any). The post is titled "I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something..."

After sharing some "Task Manager lore" (Plummer wrote TaskMgr in his den at home in 1994, and was allowed by "NT silverback devs" to incorporate it into Windows), Plummer gets into some neat tips for using it.

"If Task Manager ever hangs or crashes, start another by pressing ctrl-shift-esc," he writes. "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."

That is a neat tip. I had no idea Ctrl-Shift-Escape did anything, let along launch another Task Manager. It's like calling in the cavalry. Cool! More tips:

  • Ctrl-Shift-Esc will also launch Task Manager if Explorer is dead and your system tray is gone.
  • You can find the binary for any executing process in the process table by right clicking and pick "Show File Location".
  • You can add and remove columns, and reorder them by dragging and dropping.
  • Task Manager loads in reduced mode (just showing processes, for example) if there aren't enough resources available. "It's one of the very few apps that won't just 'fail and bail' when things go wrong," Plummer says.
  • Hold Ctrl, Alt, and Shift while restarting Task Manager if it's been corrupted, which will reset all internal settings to its factory originals.
  • If only the graph loads, double-click in the dead space in the client to switch back to normal mode.

Great tips straight from the guy who brought Task Manager to life so many years ago. You can check out Plummer's entire Reddit post here.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Latest in Gaming Industry
Pirate Bay co-founder Carl Lundstrom
Pirate Bay co-founder and far-right politician found dead after plane crash
Flag of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia buys Pokémon GO maker for $3.5 billion with a 'B'
Vice President, Games at Netflix Mike Verdu speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 on October 18, 2022 in San Francisco, California
4 short months after saying 'We'll have to adapt and change', Netflix's AI games VP adapts and changes into a person who isn't working there anymore
Astarion, a beautiful vampire spawn in Baldur's Gate 3, looks dubiously at the player character.
'What do you mean real actors?': Astarion's VO, who shared an awards category with Idris Elba after Baldur's Gate 3, remembers the dark ages of mocap
Yoda Luke and R2 in Lego form.
Lego is going to make its videogames in-house from now on, says it would 'almost rather overinvest'
A masked man with an axe in the woods
Rebellion CEO seems kind of awed by major studios making massive videogames: 'How do you organize a game that has 2,000 people working on it?'
Latest in News
Key art of the videogame Lunacid, showing a pale, long haired knight in purple armor contemplating a purple, flaming sword surrounded by the different phases of the moon.
One of my favorite indie RPGs is getting a follow-up made with FromSoftware's 25-year-old Super Mario Maker for first person dungeon crawlers
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 image - Henry riding a pink and blue striped horse while holding a fish
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 now has Steam Workshop support, and of course one of the first mods lets you adjust the 'jiggle physics'
Still image of Bastion holding a bird, taken from Microsoft's Copilot for Gaming reveal trailer
Microsoft unveils Copilot for Gaming, an AI-powered 'ultimate gaming sidekick' that will let you talk to your console so you don't have to talk to your friends
Erenshor - A player and two simulated MMO party members stand on a plateau in front of a yellow landscape
This RuneScape-looking 'simulated MMORPG' has all the nostalgia without the drama because all the other 'players' are NPCs
Pirate Bay co-founder Carl Lundstrom
Pirate Bay co-founder and far-right politician found dead after plane crash
Sunset in the desert in Hello Sunshine
Hello Sunshine is a desert survival sandbox where you live in the literal shadow of the colossus