@@DavesGarage Dont lie. You want 8800 ultras in SLI raytracing retro art from my library for the same reason a front heavy 4 speed with poor fuel to air admixture ratios because the weather was different that time of day even with trash solid rear axle is the thing to put in ones garage.
@@DavesGarage Remember quincunx? We have predication SMAA and fidelityfx. We might even get AMDs inference based DLSS knock off open source compatible with ancient hardware. It might be inferior but its higher image quality and compute efficiency can be useful as a cheat code from 2021. Except no one cares. Thats a fault.
When I worked in my company's IT Service Desk, one of the frequent questions I would get while having customers perform said reboot was, "Why does a reboot fixes things?" My answer was thus, "Programs are like three year olds. They're great at unpacking all their toys and spreading them across the RAM. They're not so great at picking up after themselves when they are done. Rebooting cleans up the RAM of all the toys the programs left on the floor."
Explaining complicated things in simple ways is one of the greatest barometers of intelligence. I’m sure people really appreciated you breaking it down for them.
@@higginsisaac It's both that and a measure of how much that person knows about the topic.If you can't explain something simply, you probably don't know enough about it. (Although this doesn't apply for really complex topics that have no simple explanation that isn't misleading)
I actually have some of my additional keyboard keys mapped to "taskkill /f /im [insert task name here]" just in case. Saved me from quite a few reboots already that would have shut down lots of programs in the background just because the bloody thing that froze would make the whole UI inaccessible, without affecting keystrokes though.
@@uploadJ yeah you had to be careful in the older DOS windows era. Task manager would let you kill system tasks with no way to get them back. Kernel in NT would at least try and restart system services if they crashed. Explorer acting up kill it and it will restart. Not so much with the DOS based windows. Kill Explorer and you are almost guaranteed a reboot.
You are correct... it's something I wrote mostly for myself, then it went from there. But there are older programs like 'top' and 'ps' on Unix that I drew from, of course!
@Nom There was some pushback from the Win95 UI team, as it wasn't really in keeping with their mission of simplifying the user experience. But within the NT team, which is where I was, it was all positive. In fact it got included just because I was using it, folks saw it, and other people wanted it too!
@@DavesGarage Windows was written for idiots. A useful tool like Task Manager violates the notion that people should rely on Windows to do everything for them.
Dude, this is like watching the guy who made fire. An invention taken for granted but the world would have gone nowhere without it. And this man came up with functions that allowed computers to be a lot easier to use. Thank you YT recommendations for working correctly this time.
The only problem is that you have to get past that step before they'll do anything else. Even if it will do absolutely nothing. Like resetting a spare network box remotely after I explain that it's a spare because the original got busted in a lightning storm... And then they try to call back before the network settles, so you lose your ticket and have to start all over again... And ultimately get fed up and do everything yourself. Every time I have to deal with consumer-level tech support I remember the xkcd "Tech Support" comic. Enterprise tech support is typically better, but typically for them, I'm trying to get things fixed without bitching that the reason it broke in the first place is because of their IT policies...
"We have to apply these next steps from a known baseline, so we have to reboot to begin at the beginning". "Oh, it's work now? OK, the other steps aren't needed then :-) "
@@DavesGarage I think the IT steps should include a decision point at the start though. "Did it let out the magic smoke? Yes: Replace. No: continue to reboot."
I remember back with I started with Linux in the days of Windows 95 the saying went "Problems in Windows? Reboot! - Problems in Linux? Be Root!" Jokes aside, Dave is a treasure trove of knowledge and nostalgia. Your insights into the history of technology is priceless!
@@akulkis yes, but why? that's what i want to know. Why doesn't Linux suffer from memory leaks, and heap fragmentation. it sounds like theres no reason why Linux would be immune to these issues, so how does linux handle these issues without needing to reboot?
@@chefdano3474 Because Unix was designed to be a multi-user, multi-processing operating system, with no "we need to shut down and reboot for user XYZ's software install/special needs/retarded actions, from the day 1. It was designed to have basic safeguards so that multiple people could use the system simultaneously without stepping on each other's toes because the kernel itself has preventative measures in the way the system data structures are designed and allocated. Windows was first a GUI layer on top of MS-DOS, then basically MS-DOS with an integrated GUI. Then they added users, and user ID's, but in the typical Microsoft half-assed sort of fashion (shortcuts work for folders, and for programs, but if you make a shortcut on your desktop to a data file, like say a Word document, it won't start up the appropriate program as it would if you clicked on the icon for the Word document in its actual location. The worst part is that Microsoft insists on 100% backwards compatibility with all of these utterly broken or otherwise ill-implemented functions and behaviors.
For some driver issues, putting a machine to sleep can be as effective as a reboot, since the hardware will have to be re-initialized during wakeup, similar (but not quite) to what happens at boot time. Hibernate can have a similar effect.
@@PhilMoskowitz this is a half truth today. yes, this can be similar if the issue is a misbehaving peripheral..W7+ are good about this. But prior to that sleep/wake was an almost guaranteed blue screen or at minimum it would be extremely unstable. ACPI standards are wonderful. RAM doesn't get cleared in sleep though...a restart is still the most effective method. For troubleshooting I would never tell someone to sleep their machine lol
Great video. I remember the days of Windows 3.11 when a reboot every few hours was an absolute necessity after opening just a few programs and closing them again!
Wow this video made me feel nostalgic, a lot of advice i haven't felt the need to do since pre W7. Back in the before time we had a NT4 file server with a slow memory leak. You had to reboot at least once a year the big problem was that after X reboots it forced a chkdsk that took about 50h to complete. So you could only reboot it late on a friday in case it needed the whole weekend to check the disks
A couple of weeks ago, for no apparent reason one of my games kept stuttering so I opened task manager to try and investigate. I noticed that every time the game stuttered my graphics usage dropped from 99% to about 10. The interesting thing I noticed was at the same time other graphs briefly appeared and disappeared, these turned out to be activity graphs for my card reader. There was nothing in the card reader and no reason for anything to access it but removing it cured the stutter in my game.
I love the Big Friendly Giant closing. Some of my earliest memories are watching him on CBC in the morning... Way, Way up, and I'll call Rusty! I loved watching the little chairs be set out at the end... and there are (exaggerated, I'm sure) reports that I would cry when the drawbridge would come up and the melody would play.
I remember a memory freeing utility that was a godsend for XP. Some kind individual made it free with a simple interface containing a few settings and a go button. In the time it took to get coffee (or get rid of some) it would free all the processes without killing your open programs and windows. Then you click something and after a pause where it reinitialized it was as smooth as a cold reboot
That was one of the most educational videos I ever watched. A lot of the Dave's Garage catalog is requisite viewing for computer ownership, but this video tied together a bunch of concepts I was never properly introduced to.
You are unbelievably amazing! Your sense of humor is oh so sly and just a tad wicked as well. Your voice is pleasantly gruff, with enough tonal variations to keep our attention, without going to annoying extremes. Your analogies are to the point, as are the illustrating examples used. I’m sorry if my gushing praise seems sycophantic, but each one of your videos I’ve seen has increased my admiration. You address questions many of us didn’t even know we were harboring in the back of our minds, putting them into terms even a neophyte can follow. Occasionally, the discussion flies far from my comprehension, and I know I’ve reached the limits of my current capacity and I need a reboot. Thank you for sharing your talents with us.
Such a handsome informative entertaining guy. I love when you toss in Canadian tidbits. You really make the episodes feel personal. No one else could ever fill your shoes.
Very good explanation of complex concepts. It is unfortunate that we've grown accustomed to operating systems that allow programs/processes to misbehave to the point that a reboot is required. As an IT professional, it is infuriating to be in the middle of a very long task that requires multiple applications, browsers, etc. to be open...only to be forced to reboot. While this probably doesn't bother casual users watching RUclips or browsing as much, there should still be efforts to detect what is causing the need to reboot, and address those without forcing a reboot.
I know, I find it so odd there isn't a better way (or at least some sort of advanced feature somewhere) that allows the state of programs to be saved between reboots. I know this would probably be a pain, but if I had to wait a bit for RAM to write to storage and then for it to pull it back up, I'd prefer that to having to pull everything back up manually. Obviously this wouldn't help with non OS problems. However, I find my firefox browser is the biggest source of frustration from this. If you forcefully end firefox through task manager, you can restore it later, whether you reboot or not. This lets me keep everything I'm researching pulled up after the reboot (or after I'm done doing something RAM intensive).
@@BeastinlosersHD Hibernation does that. Also, Task manager can dump a program's RAM, and some additional software can inject it back into memory. Not the most convenient way, though, and I'd love a suspend feature that does it in one click or so.
I suspect we don't have the "hibernation per program" in every major OS because the running programs often depend on some external state which wouldn't get saved and would cause the programs to misbehave or crash when brought up the next day.
Not everyone accepts that state of affairs. My (non-microsoft) desktop workstation has been up for 4 months without a reboot. And if I recall, it was only shut down due to all-day-long power outage that would be beyond what the UPS backup would hold it for.
Hi Dave. Good refresher topics. I was a support "engineer" in Charlotte from 1996 to 2007 in Performance, then SBS and finally SMS/SCCM. You wouldn't believe how often that question got asked on the phone. That and why update seemed to "break" their computer that had not been restarted in a year! Good to put a face with a name I had heard a few times over those years.
@@CakePrincessCelestia I sold like 3 of those things when they first came out, all 3 died within the first year. I am shocked any of them are still working.
@@wishusknight3009 Have one in an NC10 netbook and I used that thing for a few years, but at some point the connection cable for the display broke, bought a replacement, but never managed to open the whole thing since the screwheads seem to be made of butter and I couldn't get 3 or 4 of the out at all. That just sucks, but well, nowadays I wouldn't use it anymore anyway, except for maybe some DOSBox gaming. The drive never failed though...
@@CakePrincessCelestia My first ssd was a Corsair F60 which is still in use in a DAW. It sees light work now but was my main for a few years, and it has held up great. Though according to its smart diagnostic its pretty close to the end of the line. I am not sure why I had such bad luck with the vertex 60s, as I think they were the same chipset.
@G E T R E K T 2011 may be just late enough that you have a revision with a newer firmware. The ones I sold were in the 2009 to early 2010 timeframe. I know they released a new firmware to address the rash of failures, but applying it required wiping the drive. By that point, all the ones I sold had already cost my customers their pain and I moved on to other brands.
When my computer starts dragging, I've been going with the strategy of screaming as loud as I can in as high a pitched voice as I can while throwing my arms in the air and running in a circle. Now, I didn't write task manager, but I find this to be an extremely effective method regardless of operating system.
I miss those old defrag programs. Especially the really old pre xp ones. Having a peek at what the machine was doing was neat. Can't remember when was the last time I manually defragged tho. Modern NTFS and Windows are pretty good at keeping things ordered behind the scenes without user interaction.
I know what you mean! It was fun to watch it work in Windows 9x. I remember being astonished when Windows rebooted and ran defrag all by itself with nothing loaded(to avoid having to start over constantly). It was really interesting to listen to back then when every click and head movement of drives was distinct and audible. More recently, I found "Auslogic's Disk Defrag" had an option for a similar graphic view. I used it for years. Though the last time I used it.. they started pushing their other software with ads pretty hard. If you can find an older version though it used to have a really simple clean interface. I remember using it as far back as Windows Vista, and used it through Windows 8.1, I haven't really touched it past the first couple versions(builds? service packs? w/e you call it now) of Windows 10 though.
As an IT customer support specialist, I really appreciate this explanation. End users can get pretty frustrated when you ask them to reboot. Task manager is a great tool for showing end users what is happening when they complain about system performance. Now if I could just get our end users to login at least monthly to keep their PC on the domain.
@@Tiger_Pumper A swap file is not a real RAM alternative since it's WAY slower than real RAM. It's just the computer's last resort trying not to crash if there's not enough memory.
I have no IT or computer science training, just a guy who likes to learn. I have used task manager in the past and found it useful, but now I have found more uses for it. Great video!.
“Bootstrapping” comes from paradox, which is that you can’t pull yourself up off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps. The paradox of starting computers is that in order to start loading software, a computer needs software to tell it how to load software! Getting around that involves “bootstrap” code. In early machines this bootstrap code was often inserted by hand, using switches to load register contents: the bootstrap paradox was skipped by human intervention. That initial hand-loaded code sometimes started an input device, such as paper tape or card reader, or mag tape, from which the next bootstrap stage could be loaded.
I knew a guy that work for nasa back in the punch card days he gave me the horror stories of programming those cards. On a side note I like pointing out to the young whippersnappers that we sent ppl to the moon using less computing power than a cell phone.
Flipped switches on the MITS Altar 8800 in the 70s to boot it & then could read TTY paper tape to load the floppy drive. Thank goodness for ROMs later.
What made the hand entry of that initial bootstrap loader a bit more tolerable was that you didn’t need to do it every time you turned the machine on. The magnetic “core” memories of the time were non-volatile and would keep their contents with the power off, so unless you suffered a really bad software bug that overwrote that part of the RAM, the loader would still be there.
"The slide into middle-age mediocrity is a gradual one" as the video gradually zooms in, excellent sense of humor! Super informative videos, super interesting, love all of it, thank you!
When using malloc/free in MS-DOS it was always a good idea to see even that as a stack, free the most recently malloc:ed item first or you'd suffer a resource leak because the next malloc would start from the end of the last non-freed malloc.
Fragmentation is one we come along lots in game development. Back in the PSX days we used to have binary overlays between the main menu and the actual game. This was a different binary which was loaded. They both even had different memory managers because the behaviour of the memory allocation was different. It also meant when going into a new game fragmentation was totally wiped out because the memory manager was "rebooted".
Dave, I learned more from your videos that is helpful on a daily basis than any other source. Please keep up the excellent advice as many people can certainly use it and there is now where to get it at the price you charge. I am a supporter of Autism research as a relative has Aspergers.
Exactly - and what some folks don't seem to grok is that odds are, the Linux driver has the SAME bug... and would experience the same problem and the same ultimate crash. Because it's the SAME code. Yet some would argue that the Linux machine will just "absorb" the crash, pipe it to /dev/nul, and keep running.
@@DavesGarage In fact, it is harder to recover from such crashes on Linux, because Linus decided that the memory allocator should overcommit and always return success.
0:24 Basically, before a computer can start loading and executing a program, it needs to load and execute a program. See the parallel with “lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps”?
@@DavesGarage Honestly, I'd like to start with how it's structured. What some of the main group keys mean and translating the names from dev-speak to regular human. One other thing that always had me puzzled, was what was actually stored in the registry in terms of data, and details on why it exists. I have a general understanding of how it functions and maybe a cursory understanding of it's overall purpose in the system architecture but I've never had it explained to me in a way that made a whole lot of sense. Is it just a data structure a la C++, or is it more than that (or perhaps less, just a simple csv or the like). I'd also love to know why the registry tends to bloat as the PC ages. I know part of it is due to uninstalls and not fully clearing data out of the registry (for whatever reason that may be), but that's about all I know about it. As my good friend in IT would say - I know just enough to be dangerous, but with enough sense to know when I'm truly out of my depth (or in other words, a student of computer science). I will sometimes poke around and explore in the registry, and I've pulled keys and stuff out of the registry (that goes back to the days of MSN chat rooms) and I've even completely deleted unnecessary registry entries with the aid of tools meant for that purpose (always with backups!) but never really *understood* the effect it was having on the system. Hoping that my diatribe is helpful.
@@DavesGarage For one thing, *I* would like to know _where_ it keeps its information hidden; is it in a single file or is it scattered about like so many pebbles?
@@BertGrink That's easy. The registry is made up of a few hives and each is its own file. Most of the hives are in the system32\config directory, and I believe these files (COMPONENTS, SAM, SECURITY, HARDWARE, SYSTEM) are directly loaded as their corresponding entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. The user-specific registry entries are stored in the NTUSER.DAT file in each user's profile directory.
As a Canadian I must protest your gross mischaracterization of our noble and significant variant of the English language. Our vowels are neither nefarious, nor entirely limited to the letter "U"; on the contrary I think you will in fact find, if you care to look, that the letter "E" plays a far more important role (as in: "lovely day, Eh?"). As does the letter "O", particularly in speech where it's often substituted for the letter "U" (as in: "what's this bashing on our beloved Canadian language all aboOt?"). I greatly appreciate your hard work on this channel, and otherwise love your content, with this video being a particularly excellent installment! So I'm inclined to forgive you for these transgressions (and also because I'm Canadian, and it's just the polite thing to do!). Please do keep up the good work, and I hope you find all the success and fulfillment you deserve, for years to come (as long as you don't continue to bastardize our beautiful language)! ;-)
"Canadian vowels"? You mean English :-) I remember working at Microsoft Tech Support in Australia in the early noughties and we had some Microsoft employees come in from America, due to our inability to find simple fixes in the MS Knowledge Base. They were really confused at the way we write (and speak). It was surprisingly confusing even translating "full stop" for them. They finally worked out that because the Knowledge Base was American English only and we used English only, it prevented us from finding anything useful!
Your channel is a huge contribution to the community Dave. Having someone that worked at Windows NT development explain things make a lot of difference
I once told a friend/colleague that she needed to de-frag her brain. At my last (and final job), I would never turn off my computer because it took so long (Win7) to reboot. Ultimately it would bork and I would reboot and then go to the lab to chat up all the technicians.
3 года назад+9
We updated SSDs to all computers pretty early on, removed all hassle from reboot.
absolutely love your style Sir. you have just a wonderful way of explaining what could be quite complicated into something really easy to understand without "mansplaining" a topic.
Hi Dave! I love your videos! It's awesome to hear from someone who actually wrote part of Windows. Your videos bring back lots of memories - for better or worse... I started in IT way back in 1978, with IBM. I witnessed the entire OS/2 debacle, and subsequent dominance of Windows. IBM made so many blatant mistakes with OS/2 that it's funny now... but it wasn't funny then. Back in 1990-91, I was in technical support group that worked closely with the development group that was engineering a product called OfficeVision/2... IBM's LAN-based office system that provided e-mail, calendars, and contacts, and communicated with Officevision on other IBM platforms. From the very beginning, it was a bloated disaster that never even came close to working in the real world. It had some very interesting functionality such as support for iBM's super-heavyweight Document Content Architecture (DCA) and Document Interchange Architecture (DIA) - but it had so much application code in it that it overwhelmed the modest PC hardware of the time. We were running 286-based machines with 1 MB to 4MB of "extended" RAM, and later 386-based machines with a proper 32-bit machine architecture that enabled the OS to properly manage large memory spaces. Running a gigantic app like OV/2 on the tiny little machines like we had was like trying to pull a train with a pickup truck! So much OV/2 code was loaded, and the application working sets became so large, OS/2 would page to disk like mad, sometimes for the better part of a minute, and sometimes longer than that... while we sat there waiting. It was crazy! There was no defrag utility for the OS/2 High Performance File System (HPFS), so who knows how fragged our disks probably got. We reformatted and reinstalled OS/2 and the OV/2 app MANY times though... I do remember that. Anyway, the OV/2 version that never came out was based on OS/2 and it's newly-developed "Workplace Shell" - a novel object-oriented desktop UI that enabled the user to drag icons around and perform actions with them - like deleting the file by dragging it to the trash can icon, moving or copying it by dropping on another folder icon, or printing by dropping it on a printer icon. The Workplace Shell was pretty slow and unstable back then, and it frequently crashed itself - which required a reboot to get the system back. It had its own version of Task Manager - I don't remember what it was called. Frequently, we would need to use it to kill an errant or hung OV/2 process, but it often didn't work. I remember having a rather stressful conversation with OS/2 development about not being able to force kill a Workplace Shell application process reliably. The conversation went in circles, and the dev guy just couldn't understand why the user should EVER be able to force kill an application process (e.g. a hung e-mail creation window running the OV/2 word processor), because that would lead to "losing the user's data". I kept telling him that if the app process was ALREADY unresponsive, there was no way to "save" the user's data anyway - so the process needed to be force killed to allow OS/2 to reclaim the memory the hung app process was consuming. I just couldn't get him to understand that, and I don't recall if it was ever fixed in OS/2. It turned out the the Workplace Shell didn't work like your WIndows Task Manager did... the Workplace Shell would simply "ask" the application process to terminate, which of course wouldn't work if the app was already unresponsive and not able to service the Workplace Shell's "terminate" API call to it. D'Oh! Round and round we went... Looking back on all that, it's funny now. Due to IBM's unmitigated corporate arrogance with OS/2, it became a ghost OS in a few more years, and eventually just disappeared from the PC world altogether - although it lived on (in infamy?) in some applications buried in other things for quite a few more years - and Windows went on to rule the PC world. Anyway, it's cool to hear from the guy who actually WROTE the Windows Task Manager to do what it needed to do, in the right way, RELIABLY. Nowadays I use an M1 MacBookPro running MacOS Ventura with 32 GB of RAM and a very fast SSD - but MacOS STILL slows down after several days (I have measured the performance of my various apps and verified this slowdown over time), and I have to reboot to restore the performance. The MacOS Activity Monitor never shows that memory is all used up (it never seems to be anywhere near 100%), but the system does measurably slow down over time. I am convinced that there is SOMETHING in MacOS relating to memory management that just doesn't work right, and slows the machine down after several days of use, until a reboot clears all of that out and the machine is fast again. This happened on my previous Intel-based MBPs too, so it isn't an M1 thing. I have Googled the topic ad nauseum, but the only things I've found to resolve the decaying performance over time is to simply reboot. It's maddening that here in 2023, Apple STILL hasn't figured out how to reliably manage system resources like memory (or pointers or SSD file references or whatever) to keep the performance fast over time without the user having to reboot periodically!
Another reason that rebooting sometimes fixes things ( if you're not running ECC RAM ) is memory errors. Yup, even though there is nothing wrong with your RAM and it works fine... it can still in very rare cases accidentally flip a 1 to a 0. If this happens in the Operating system layer ( ring 0 ) it can cause anything from BSD's to slowdowns and memory leaks to straight up broken behavior. The easiest fix is definitely a reboot.
Speaking of memory, my old HP computer’s hard drive stays the same in terms of space as long as I don’t add files. I usually use the browser and I’m always putting it in hibernation mode. - On the other hand, my newer Apple Air computer every time I use a browser it devours my hard drive space and I have to restart it almost all the time.
Hi Dave, I've been a live long Windows guy, both in the Data Center and for personal use. I'd love to hear your thoughts on if the registry really gets bloated and if that can slow down performance. Also I'd like to hear your same thoughts on C:\Windows\Prefetch and if having to much in prefetch can also slow down your system. Each one of those videos would be worth a coffee mug for me.
Your invaluable addition to Windows has spared me a great deal of rebooting. I don't know what it is, but just hitting ctrl+shift+esc seems to have an effect like the crack of birch across a teak desk.
Engineer: "Hey, my machine is locked up." Tech: "Just reboot it." Engineer: "That's not a fix ... I'm going to lose hours of work." Tech: "Well, we can reformat your hard drive." Engineer: "Stay away from my computer."
_Uwa!_ I keep Task Manager minimized to my systray at all times, ready to roll at a moment's notice, such is its glory and utility. Thank you, Dave, for making one of my favorite instruments in the operating system orchestra.
As a game dev, I have Unity, VS, Crome, and Task Mannager up at all times. It is surprisingly easy to create an infinite loop in a Start Function without relising it.
Wow !!!! My ears perked up when you said , RingZero .... Due to your background , could you do a video on how in the beginning Windows and OS/2 played together but later on went in different directions . It is my limited understanding , but I was told OS/2 used RingZero differently? What’s the story on how the two operating systems dealt with security and the rings ?
Nice Video. Always interesting to watch/hear your open informative discussions from your previous life as Microsoft Engineer. :) :) I used to have a VCR that I swear must have been running Windows Embedded OS. About every 3 months, it would go crazy... Powering Off/On didn't help, because, powering off many devices doesn't actually power them off, they just blank the screen and go into idle mode (a clue is they usually have a clock or some LED lights that stay on...). When it would go nuts (again, about every 3 months), I would physically unplug it for about 10-20 minutes, plug it back in, and then it would run just fine for another 3 months or so.. What fun. :) :)
Task manager is definitely the number one app I keep open on my windows machine any time I use it. It helps extend the life of my computers time and again.
Dave, good discussion! I have to point out that a "reboot" is loading BIOS. The old systems had just enough ROM to load the floppy driver code. The floppy would "boot" the IO code allowing the system to work with much more complicated disk drives of the day. The operating system would then be "IPL"d or initial program load. Once your operating system loaded, you could run applications. Computers today just map flash memory into the processor's memory space where the processor knows to go when it first turns on. Back in the day it was a lot easier to send a net floppy boot disk than a tube of ROMs and have a tech install them. Now we just download new code from the internet and reflash! Thanks for the video!
Another thing i would mention is windows updates, unless you check you might not realize that a pending update has been downloaded and was not allowed to install for a while, the way windows stores updates in memory will tend to slow down a machine considerably but is hard to distinguish on task manager
Sometimes id does. But it's only checking integrity of main Windows system files while you may get problems elsewhere: * In your Registry * In other files
@@martinlord5969 Not really. I only look into dism cleanup and so on after sfc scannow fails. I also do a sfc scannow in safe mode if it fails just to be sure. Then I execute dism commands to correct the system files that have problems.
10:46 - I run 'hidden icons' on the desktop and have a link to the desktop in the start menu and pinned in explorer. I enjoy a clean desktop, and can use the desktop like any other folder. I love it.
If emerging NVRAM gets more widely spread and integrated in more programs and maybe even system components, we might enter a time where a reboot doesn't fix as many issues as it used to. :D
My introduction to the technical details of Windows came with NT4.0, I later encountered NT3.1 and so gained a retrospective insight, I think NT4.0 is still at the core of today's Windows, a wonderful UNIX inspired operating system, I love it
Hi there! I recall that on older Windows versions, the task manager had an option to kill an entire process tree. This option doesn't seem to exist any longer in my Windows 10 version. Any idea why that changed? To be honest though, I never felt the need to use that option. Killing only the non-responding process always did the trick for me.
The process of computer startup has been know by several other terms in addition to booting. Some I have learned over the decades are: dead start, cold start, warm start, daily start and IPL (Initial Program Load).
So much history and personal experience to unpack. I've worked with computers in one form or another since 1974. I'm on the spectrum as well, so thanks for raising awareness. IMHO, one of the advantages of vendors of microcomputer products was that most non-IT-pro users had no initial expectations of system stability or uptime. This allowed hardware, OS and end-user software developers to get away with delivering products that focused more on "more features to market faster" than stability that in a commercial setting would have been unacceptable. As a former IT professional tasked with deploying and supporting products in Microsoft's ecosystems from MS-DOS onwards, I often railed at Microsoft's apparent willingness to avoid the hard work of "root cause analysis" in favor of the "just reboot it and everything will be fine" approach. It's truly sad (and more than a little frustrating) that Microsoft appears to be OK in adhering to this philosophy to the present day. My experience with "grown-up" commercial operating systems (while not trouble-free) were accompanied by vendor support aligned with an expectation of stability / high uptime. I left the Microsoft ecosystem for FOSS long ago and despite its own growing pains, it has achieved levels of reliability and functionality that Microsoft could have achieved decades ago. These days, I only run Windows in a virtual machine that gets rolled back to a stable snapshot after every use. I don't need antivirus or any of the other crap-ware foisted on users by the hardware OEM's, so it's lean and fast. My Linux environment on a Threadripper 3960 with redundant SSD arrays runs the ZFS file system and gives me all of the things I wish Microsoft have provided with Windows NT 4.0.
How about a quick session to talk about the Stuxnet virus? Since that used a few flaws / design decisions, I would love to hear your thougths on the topic.
@@wirenutt57 A general windows security session would be better. How to better protect your system. But, I would still love to hear Daves thoughts on the mechanisms that enabled Stuxnet to infect the computers to that degree. Ofcourse, a similar talk about the ransomwares in general could also be nice.
"Have you tried turning it off and back on again" is absolutely the first step in just about everything. It recently fixed my oven when it was getting too hot and my TV when it had no sound.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
It's good to see a Saskatchewan boy do well for himself and do something for a cause he believes in. Good on you Dave!
Go Riders!
@@DavesGarage
Because software engineers need to be replaced by skynet.
@@DavesGarage
Dont lie. You want 8800 ultras in SLI raytracing retro art from my library for the same reason a front heavy 4 speed with poor fuel to air admixture ratios because the weather was different that time of day even with trash solid rear axle is the thing to put in ones garage.
@@DavesGarage
Remember quincunx?
We have predication SMAA and fidelityfx. We might even get AMDs inference based DLSS knock off open source compatible with ancient hardware. It might be inferior but its higher image quality and compute efficiency can be useful as a cheat code from 2021. Except no one cares.
Thats a fault.
@@DavesGarage
How can you drag race and not mention microsofts absolutely objectively garbage thread scheduler?
When I worked in my company's IT Service Desk, one of the frequent questions I would get while having customers perform said reboot was, "Why does a reboot fixes things?"
My answer was thus, "Programs are like three year olds. They're great at unpacking all their toys and spreading them across the RAM. They're not so great at picking up after themselves when they are done. Rebooting cleans up the RAM of all the toys the programs left on the floor."
Excellent analogy
So, you didn’t know either.
@@oldcountryman2795 It's a metaphor.
Explaining complicated things in simple ways is one of the greatest barometers of intelligence. I’m sure people really appreciated you breaking it down for them.
@@higginsisaac It's both that and a measure of how much that person knows about the topic.If you can't explain something simply, you probably don't know enough about it. (Although this doesn't apply for really complex topics that have no simple explanation that isn't misleading)
Terminating a misbehaving process using Task Manager is not only a wise approach... it's also immensely satisfying.
Yes ... under Xp or later. Not so much under Win '98 SE (tried this just last night) ...
I actually have some of my additional keyboard keys mapped to "taskkill /f /im [insert task name here]" just in case. Saved me from quite a few reboots already that would have shut down lots of programs in the background just because the bloody thing that froze would make the whole UI inaccessible, without affecting keystrokes though.
@@uploadJ yeah you had to be careful in the older DOS windows era. Task manager would let you kill system tasks with no way to get them back. Kernel in NT would at least try and restart system services if they crashed. Explorer acting up kill it and it will restart. Not so much with the DOS based windows. Kill Explorer and you are almost guaranteed a reboot.
Not as satisfying as `get-process devenv* | kill` in Powershell
It is literally the only way that I close games. So much more satisfying of a way to rage quit.
I love how he just casually talks about the fact that he wrote task manager.
You are correct... it's something I wrote mostly for myself, then it went from there. But there are older programs like 'top' and 'ps' on Unix that I drew from, of course!
@@DavesGarage Love Task Manager. Have been using it since it first came with NT :)
@Nom There was some pushback from the Win95 UI team, as it wasn't really in keeping with their mission of simplifying the user experience. But within the NT team, which is where I was, it was all positive. In fact it got included just because I was using it, folks saw it, and other people wanted it too!
@@DavesGarage Windows was written for idiots. A useful tool like Task Manager violates the notion that people should rely on Windows to do everything for them.
Exactemundo. Casually, lol
Dude, this is like watching the guy who made fire. An invention taken for granted but the world would have gone nowhere without it. And this man came up with functions that allowed computers to be a lot easier to use.
Thank you YT recommendations for working correctly this time.
Um, most of these things were invented before Windows ever came around, either for Unix or for some Xerox PARC project in the early 80s.
@@leftaroundabout well... You got that on yourself
r/whooosh
@@leftaroundabout ☝️🤓
I THOUGHT THIS VIDEO WAS COOL AND ALL BUT
"Task manager helps all this, thats why i wrote it"
I SPIT OUT MY PIZZA
Words fail me to express how grateful I am that you made task manager available. I have learned so much through use, and used it to no end for years.
There's always truth to the I.T. guy at work when he asks you "Have you tried turning it off and on again?". Love the vid.
The only problem is that you have to get past that step before they'll do anything else. Even if it will do absolutely nothing. Like resetting a spare network box remotely after I explain that it's a spare because the original got busted in a lightning storm... And then they try to call back before the network settles, so you lose your ticket and have to start all over again...
And ultimately get fed up and do everything yourself.
Every time I have to deal with consumer-level tech support I remember the xkcd "Tech Support" comic.
Enterprise tech support is typically better, but typically for them, I'm trying to get things fixed without bitching that the reason it broke in the first place is because of their IT policies...
Sad part is, most people answer "it won't fix my issue, do your work" even if 90% of the time, it DOES fix the issue
"We have to apply these next steps from a known baseline, so we have to reboot to begin at the beginning". "Oh, it's work now? OK, the other steps aren't needed then :-) "
@@DavesGarage I think the IT steps should include a decision point at the start though. "Did it let out the magic smoke? Yes: Replace. No: continue to reboot."
@@ssholum SHIBBOLEET! SHIBBOLEET!
I remember back with I started with Linux in the days of Windows 95 the saying went "Problems in Windows? Reboot! - Problems in Linux? Be Root!"
Jokes aside, Dave is a treasure trove of knowledge and nostalgia.
Your insights into the history of technology is priceless!
Linux is like be root at your responsibility, next thing you know you lost your monitor lol
It's still true to this day.
@@akulkis yes, but why? that's what i want to know. Why doesn't Linux suffer from memory leaks, and heap fragmentation. it sounds like theres no reason why Linux would be immune to these issues, so how does linux handle these issues without needing to reboot?
@@chefdano3474
Because Unix was designed to be a multi-user, multi-processing operating system, with no "we need to shut down and reboot for user XYZ's software install/special needs/retarded actions, from the day 1. It was designed to have basic safeguards so that multiple people could use the system simultaneously without stepping on each other's toes because the kernel itself has preventative measures in the way the system data structures are designed and allocated.
Windows was first a GUI layer on top of MS-DOS, then basically MS-DOS with an integrated GUI. Then they added users, and user ID's, but in the typical Microsoft half-assed sort of fashion (shortcuts work for folders, and for programs, but if you make a shortcut on your desktop to a data file, like say a Word document, it won't start up the appropriate program as it would if you clicked on the icon for the Word document in its actual location.
The worst part is that Microsoft insists on 100% backwards compatibility with all of these utterly broken or otherwise ill-implemented functions and behaviors.
You sudo well.
I lost it at "Ask me how I know these things". Oh, so true :))
We've all been there I'm sure!
Your wry expression spoke volumes there! I immediately wanted to ask you how you knew. lol
For some driver issues, putting a machine to sleep can be as effective as a reboot, since the hardware will have to be re-initialized during wakeup, similar (but not quite) to what happens at boot time. Hibernate can have a similar effect.
Careful here. Many people will consider a suspend state (S1/S2) the same as a hibernate state ( S3/S4).
@@PhilMoskowitz this is a half truth today. yes, this can be similar if the issue is a misbehaving peripheral..W7+ are good about this. But prior to that sleep/wake was an almost guaranteed blue screen or at minimum it would be extremely unstable. ACPI standards are wonderful. RAM doesn't get cleared in sleep though...a restart is still the most effective method. For troubleshooting I would never tell someone to sleep their machine lol
Hibernate mode was a big deal when Windows 2000 was my OS.
I would love a video about windows registry and its history.
+1
@@igorthelight that's what the like button is for
@@subg9165 Replying to a comment usually has a bigger impact on getting it to show up higher than liking alone
[Because]
too_many_ini_files=true
yes, and ask the real question: "Whyyyyyyy"??
This man wrote the most important Windows tool. Task manager. Wont ask praises. Humble man.
Great video. I remember the days of Windows 3.11 when a reboot every few hours was an absolute necessity after opening just a few programs and closing them again!
it's absolutely amazing how the greatest parts of windows we use on a daily basis have their origin in the fingertips of this genius man
Wow this video made me feel nostalgic, a lot of advice i haven't felt the need to do since pre W7.
Back in the before time we had a NT4 file server with a slow memory leak. You had to reboot at least once a year the big problem was that after X reboots it forced a chkdsk that took about 50h to complete. So you could only reboot it late on a friday in case it needed the whole weekend to check the disks
A couple of weeks ago, for no apparent reason one of my games kept stuttering so I opened task manager to try and investigate. I noticed that every time the game stuttered my graphics usage dropped from 99% to about 10. The interesting thing I noticed was at the same time other graphs briefly appeared and disappeared, these turned out to be activity graphs for my card reader. There was nothing in the card reader and no reason for anything to access it but removing it cured the stutter in my game.
I love the Big Friendly Giant closing. Some of my earliest memories are watching him on CBC in the morning... Way, Way up, and I'll call Rusty! I loved watching the little chairs be set out at the end... and there are (exaggerated, I'm sure) reports that I would cry when the drawbridge would come up and the melody would play.
We must be about the same age :-)
I remember a memory freeing utility that was a godsend for XP. Some kind individual made it free with a simple interface containing a few settings and a go button. In the time it took to get coffee (or get rid of some) it would free all the processes without killing your open programs and windows. Then you click something and after a pause where it reinitialized it was as smooth as a cold reboot
That was one of the most educational videos I ever watched. A lot of the Dave's Garage catalog is requisite viewing for computer ownership, but this video tied together a bunch of concepts I was never properly introduced to.
You are unbelievably amazing! Your sense of humor is oh so sly and just a tad wicked as well. Your voice is pleasantly gruff, with enough tonal variations to keep our attention, without going to annoying extremes. Your analogies are to the point, as are the illustrating examples used.
I’m sorry if my gushing praise seems sycophantic, but each one of your videos I’ve seen has increased my admiration. You address questions many of us didn’t even know we were harboring in the back of our minds, putting them into terms even a neophyte can follow. Occasionally, the discussion flies far from my comprehension, and I know I’ve reached the limits of my current capacity and I need a reboot. Thank you for sharing your talents with us.
Dave, another thing you might want to touch on is altering process priority and CPU affinity using Task Manager. It's super useful sometimes.
Such a handsome informative entertaining guy. I love when you toss in Canadian tidbits. You really make the episodes feel personal. No one else could ever fill your shoes.
Very good explanation of complex concepts.
It is unfortunate that we've grown accustomed to operating systems that allow programs/processes to misbehave to the point that a reboot is required. As an IT professional, it is infuriating to be in the middle of a very long task that requires multiple applications, browsers, etc. to be open...only to be forced to reboot. While this probably doesn't bother casual users watching RUclips or browsing as much, there should still be efforts to detect what is causing the need to reboot, and address those without forcing a reboot.
I know, I find it so odd there isn't a better way (or at least some sort of advanced feature somewhere) that allows the state of programs to be saved between reboots. I know this would probably be a pain, but if I had to wait a bit for RAM to write to storage and then for it to pull it back up, I'd prefer that to having to pull everything back up manually. Obviously this wouldn't help with non OS problems.
However, I find my firefox browser is the biggest source of frustration from this. If you forcefully end firefox through task manager, you can restore it later, whether you reboot or not. This lets me keep everything I'm researching pulled up after the reboot (or after I'm done doing something RAM intensive).
@@BeastinlosersHD It's technically possible and has actually been done. PowerPC/WinCE worked this way.
@@BeastinlosersHD Hibernation does that. Also, Task manager can dump a program's RAM, and some additional software can inject it back into memory. Not the most convenient way, though, and I'd love a suspend feature that does it in one click or so.
I suspect we don't have the "hibernation per program" in every major OS because the running programs often depend on some external state which wouldn't get saved and would cause the programs to misbehave or crash when brought up the next day.
Not everyone accepts that state of affairs. My (non-microsoft) desktop workstation has been up for 4 months without a reboot. And if I recall, it was only shut down due to all-day-long power outage that would be beyond what the UPS backup would hold it for.
Good on you, Dave. Been using your Task Manager for the past 40 years ....
Indeed a killer app
Even with the knowledge I have,this was still entertaining.
I am glad you are sharing your accumulated stories and wisdom.
Glad to hear it!
Hi Dave. Good refresher topics. I was a support "engineer" in Charlotte from 1996 to 2007 in Performance, then SBS and finally SMS/SCCM. You wouldn't believe how often that question got asked on the phone. That and why update seemed to "break" their computer that had not been restarted in a year! Good to put a face with a name I had heard a few times over those years.
"Heads have to travel" - That made my SSD chuckle.
I could hear my 12 yo OCZ Vertex 60GB rumble... :)
@@CakePrincessCelestia I sold like 3 of those things when they first came out, all 3 died within the first year. I am shocked any of them are still working.
@@wishusknight3009 Have one in an NC10 netbook and I used that thing for a few years, but at some point the connection cable for the display broke, bought a replacement, but never managed to open the whole thing since the screwheads seem to be made of butter and I couldn't get 3 or 4 of the out at all. That just sucks, but well, nowadays I wouldn't use it anymore anyway, except for maybe some DOSBox gaming. The drive never failed though...
@@CakePrincessCelestia My first ssd was a Corsair F60 which is still in use in a DAW. It sees light work now but was my main for a few years, and it has held up great. Though according to its smart diagnostic its pretty close to the end of the line. I am not sure why I had such bad luck with the vertex 60s, as I think they were the same chipset.
@G E T R E K T 2011 may be just late enough that you have a revision with a newer firmware. The ones I sold were in the 2009 to early 2010 timeframe. I know they released a new firmware to address the rash of failures, but applying it required wiping the drive. By that point, all the ones I sold had already cost my customers their pain and I moved on to other brands.
When my computer starts dragging, I've been going with the strategy of screaming as loud as I can in as high a pitched voice as I can while throwing my arms in the air and running in a circle. Now, I didn't write task manager, but I find this to be an extremely effective method regardless of operating system.
I miss those old defrag programs. Especially the really old pre xp ones. Having a peek at what the machine was doing was neat.
Can't remember when was the last time I manually defragged tho. Modern NTFS and Windows are pretty good at keeping things ordered behind the scenes without user interaction.
I know what you mean! It was fun to watch it work in Windows 9x. I remember being astonished when Windows rebooted and ran defrag all by itself with nothing loaded(to avoid having to start over constantly). It was really interesting to listen to back then when every click and head movement of drives was distinct and audible.
More recently, I found "Auslogic's Disk Defrag" had an option for a similar graphic view. I used it for years. Though the last time I used it.. they started pushing their other software with ads pretty hard. If you can find an older version though it used to have a really simple clean interface. I remember using it as far back as Windows Vista, and used it through Windows 8.1, I haven't really touched it past the first couple versions(builds? service packs? w/e you call it now) of Windows 10 though.
And now with the proliferation of SSDs, defragging is becoming obsolete.
Watching the defrag blocks move was relaxing.
@@waltciii3 Completely agree, so satisfying to know “all your ducks were in a row!” 🦆🦆🦆
I wondered about that when he mentioned defrag. Other operating systems solve that on file system level, and I assumed Windows would, too.
As an IT customer support specialist, I really appreciate this explanation. End users can get pretty frustrated when you ask them to reboot. Task manager is a great tool for showing end users what is happening when they complain about system performance. Now if I could just get our end users to login at least monthly to keep their PC on the domain.
RAM: *exists
Google Chrome: "I'll take the entire stock"
Would a Swap partition fix that issue?
@@Tiger_Pumper A swap file is not a real RAM alternative since it's WAY slower than real RAM. It's just the computer's last resort trying not to crash if there's not enough memory.
My 4gb ram can barely stand nowadays browser, i had to spend my HD as virtual memory... :(
I have no IT or computer science training, just a guy who likes to learn. I have used task manager in the past and found it useful, but now I have found more uses for it. Great video!.
“Bootstrapping” comes from paradox, which is that you can’t pull yourself up off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps. The paradox of starting computers is that in order to start loading software, a computer needs software to tell it how to load software! Getting around that involves “bootstrap” code. In early machines this bootstrap code was often inserted by hand, using switches to load register contents: the bootstrap paradox was skipped by human intervention. That initial hand-loaded code sometimes started an input device, such as paper tape or card reader, or mag tape, from which the next bootstrap stage could be loaded.
I knew a guy that work for nasa back in the punch card days he gave me the horror stories of programming those cards. On a side note I like pointing out to the young whippersnappers that we sent ppl to the moon using less computing power than a cell phone.
@@egor102 I used to play with punch cards as a child in the basement of my parents house in the 60s. Guess what business I ended in 😎
@@fromgermany271 lol.
Flipped switches on the MITS Altar 8800 in the 70s to boot it & then could read TTY paper tape to load the floppy drive. Thank goodness for ROMs later.
What made the hand entry of that initial bootstrap loader a bit more tolerable was that you didn’t need to do it every time you turned the machine on. The magnetic “core” memories of the time were non-volatile and would keep their contents with the power off, so unless you suffered a really bad software bug that overwrote that part of the RAM, the loader would still be there.
"The slide into middle-age mediocrity is a gradual one" as the video gradually zooms in, excellent sense of humor! Super informative videos, super interesting, love all of it, thank you!
When using malloc/free in MS-DOS it was always a good idea to see even that as a stack, free the most recently malloc:ed item first or you'd suffer a resource leak because the next malloc would start from the end of the last non-freed malloc.
Fragmentation is one we come along lots in game development. Back in the PSX days we used to have binary overlays between the main menu and the actual game. This was a different binary which was loaded. They both even had different memory managers because the behaviour of the memory allocation was different. It also meant when going into a new game fragmentation was totally wiped out because the memory manager was "rebooted".
Great video Dave 👍
Dave, I learned more from your videos that is helpful on a daily basis than any other source. Please keep up the excellent advice as many people can certainly use it and there is now where to get it at the price you charge. I am a supporter of Autism research as a relative has Aspergers.
Video card driver bugs a good source for problems that look like a windows bug but isn't like a memory leak in dwm
True!
Props for writing my favorite part of NT, Dave!
5:50 i remember this happening in an PUBG limited time mode, the nvidia driver would start leaking memory like crazy and than bsod your pc
Exactly - and what some folks don't seem to grok is that odds are, the Linux driver has the SAME bug... and would experience the same problem and the same ultimate crash. Because it's the SAME code. Yet some would argue that the Linux machine will just "absorb" the crash, pipe it to /dev/nul, and keep running.
@@DavesGarage In fact, it is harder to recover from such crashes on Linux, because Linus decided that the memory allocator should overcommit and always return success.
Hello from Bulgaria! Love every single video you made!
I appreciate your videos, thanks for the knowledge!
0:24 Basically, before a computer can start loading and executing a program, it needs to load and execute a program. See the parallel with “lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps”?
I'd love to see some videos on the registry. I might be the only one though.
Love your videos Dave. Keep 'em coming!
I'd love to, but what would you like to know about it? If there are questions you can think of that'd be a great start!
@@DavesGarage Honestly, I'd like to start with how it's structured. What some of the main group keys mean and translating the names from dev-speak to regular human.
One other thing that always had me puzzled, was what was actually stored in the registry in terms of data, and details on why it exists.
I have a general understanding of how it functions and maybe a cursory understanding of it's overall purpose in the system architecture but I've never had it explained to me in a way that made a whole lot of sense. Is it just a data structure a la C++, or is it more than that (or perhaps less, just a simple csv or the like).
I'd also love to know why the registry tends to bloat as the PC ages. I know part of it is due to uninstalls and not fully clearing data out of the registry (for whatever reason that may be), but that's about all I know about it.
As my good friend in IT would say - I know just enough to be dangerous, but with enough sense to know when I'm truly out of my depth (or in other words, a student of computer science). I will sometimes poke around and explore in the registry, and I've pulled keys and stuff out of the registry (that goes back to the days of MSN chat rooms) and I've even completely deleted unnecessary registry entries with the aid of tools meant for that purpose (always with backups!) but never really *understood* the effect it was having on the system.
Hoping that my diatribe is helpful.
@@DavesGarage For one thing, *I* would like to know _where_ it keeps its information hidden; is it in a single file or is it scattered about like so many pebbles?
@@BertGrink That's easy. The registry is made up of a few hives and each is its own file. Most of the hives are in the system32\config directory, and I believe these files (COMPONENTS, SAM, SECURITY, HARDWARE, SYSTEM) are directly loaded as their corresponding entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. The user-specific registry entries are stored in the NTUSER.DAT file in each user's profile directory.
@@eDoc2020 Thanks for the reply, now i have something new and interesting to investigate. :)
As a Canadian I must protest your gross mischaracterization of our noble and significant variant of the English language.
Our vowels are neither nefarious, nor entirely limited to the letter "U"; on the contrary I think you will in fact find, if you care to look, that the letter "E" plays a far more important role (as in: "lovely day, Eh?"). As does the letter "O", particularly in speech where it's often substituted for the letter "U" (as in: "what's this bashing on our beloved Canadian language all aboOt?").
I greatly appreciate your hard work on this channel, and otherwise love your content, with this video being a particularly excellent installment! So I'm inclined to forgive you for these transgressions (and also because I'm Canadian, and it's just the polite thing to do!).
Please do keep up the good work, and I hope you find all the success and fulfillment you deserve, for years to come (as long as you don't continue to bastardize our beautiful language)!
;-)
I think your toque is too tight!
"Canadian vowels"? You mean English :-)
I remember working at Microsoft Tech Support in Australia in the early noughties and we had some Microsoft employees come in from America, due to our inability to find simple fixes in the MS Knowledge Base. They were really confused at the way we write (and speak). It was surprisingly confusing even translating "full stop" for them. They finally worked out that because the Knowledge Base was American English only and we used English only, it prevented us from finding anything useful!
Really enjoy the channel. Taskmanager has always been the mvp of windows.
Your channel is a huge contribution to the community Dave. Having someone that worked at Windows NT development explain things make a lot of difference
Task manager is one of the best things in windows. I use it all the time. Thanks a lot sir.
I once told a friend/colleague that she needed to de-frag her brain. At my last (and final job), I would never turn off my computer because it took so long (Win7) to reboot. Ultimately it would bork and I would reboot and then go to the lab to chat up all the technicians.
We updated SSDs to all computers pretty early on, removed all hassle from reboot.
absolutely love your style Sir. you have just a wonderful way of explaining what could be quite complicated into something really easy to understand without "mansplaining" a topic.
I was actually drinking out of my Dave's Garage mug when he said he wasn't selling anything 🤣
Hi Dave! I love your videos! It's awesome to hear from someone who actually wrote part of Windows. Your videos bring back lots of memories - for better or worse...
I started in IT way back in 1978, with IBM. I witnessed the entire OS/2 debacle, and subsequent dominance of Windows. IBM made so many blatant mistakes with OS/2 that it's funny now... but it wasn't funny then. Back in 1990-91, I was in technical support group that worked closely with the development group that was engineering a product called OfficeVision/2... IBM's LAN-based office system that provided e-mail, calendars, and contacts, and communicated with Officevision on other IBM platforms. From the very beginning, it was a bloated disaster that never even came close to working in the real world. It had some very interesting functionality such as support for iBM's super-heavyweight Document Content Architecture (DCA) and Document Interchange Architecture (DIA) - but it had so much application code in it that it overwhelmed the modest PC hardware of the time. We were running 286-based machines with 1 MB to 4MB of "extended" RAM, and later 386-based machines with a proper 32-bit machine architecture that enabled the OS to properly manage large memory spaces.
Running a gigantic app like OV/2 on the tiny little machines like we had was like trying to pull a train with a pickup truck! So much OV/2 code was loaded, and the application working sets became so large, OS/2 would page to disk like mad, sometimes for the better part of a minute, and sometimes longer than that... while we sat there waiting. It was crazy! There was no defrag utility for the OS/2 High Performance File System (HPFS), so who knows how fragged our disks probably got. We reformatted and reinstalled OS/2 and the OV/2 app MANY times though... I do remember that.
Anyway, the OV/2 version that never came out was based on OS/2 and it's newly-developed "Workplace Shell" - a novel object-oriented desktop UI that enabled the user to drag icons around and perform actions with them - like deleting the file by dragging it to the trash can icon, moving or copying it by dropping on another folder icon, or printing by dropping it on a printer icon. The Workplace Shell was pretty slow and unstable back then, and it frequently crashed itself - which required a reboot to get the system back. It had its own version of Task Manager - I don't remember what it was called. Frequently, we would need to use it to kill an errant or hung OV/2 process, but it often didn't work.
I remember having a rather stressful conversation with OS/2 development about not being able to force kill a Workplace Shell application process reliably. The conversation went in circles, and the dev guy just couldn't understand why the user should EVER be able to force kill an application process (e.g. a hung e-mail creation window running the OV/2 word processor), because that would lead to "losing the user's data". I kept telling him that if the app process was ALREADY unresponsive, there was no way to "save" the user's data anyway - so the process needed to be force killed to allow OS/2 to reclaim the memory the hung app process was consuming. I just couldn't get him to understand that, and I don't recall if it was ever fixed in OS/2. It turned out the the Workplace Shell didn't work like your WIndows Task Manager did... the Workplace Shell would simply "ask" the application process to terminate, which of course wouldn't work if the app was already unresponsive and not able to service the Workplace Shell's "terminate" API call to it. D'Oh! Round and round we went...
Looking back on all that, it's funny now. Due to IBM's unmitigated corporate arrogance with OS/2, it became a ghost OS in a few more years, and eventually just disappeared from the PC world altogether - although it lived on (in infamy?) in some applications buried in other things for quite a few more years - and Windows went on to rule the PC world. Anyway, it's cool to hear from the guy who actually WROTE the Windows Task Manager to do what it needed to do, in the right way, RELIABLY.
Nowadays I use an M1 MacBookPro running MacOS Ventura with 32 GB of RAM and a very fast SSD - but MacOS STILL slows down after several days (I have measured the performance of my various apps and verified this slowdown over time), and I have to reboot to restore the performance. The MacOS Activity Monitor never shows that memory is all used up (it never seems to be anywhere near 100%), but the system does measurably slow down over time. I am convinced that there is SOMETHING in MacOS relating to memory management that just doesn't work right, and slows the machine down after several days of use, until a reboot clears all of that out and the machine is fast again. This happened on my previous Intel-based MBPs too, so it isn't an M1 thing. I have Googled the topic ad nauseum, but the only things I've found to resolve the decaying performance over time is to simply reboot. It's maddening that here in 2023, Apple STILL hasn't figured out how to reliably manage system resources like memory (or pointers or SSD file references or whatever) to keep the performance fast over time without the user having to reboot periodically!
At least now I know who to blame when task manager freezes up.
Thank you Dave! This is the most legit channel I know. Love it.
Another reason that rebooting sometimes fixes things ( if you're not running ECC RAM ) is memory errors. Yup, even though there is nothing wrong with your RAM and it works fine... it can still in very rare cases accidentally flip a 1 to a 0. If this happens in the Operating system layer ( ring 0 ) it can cause anything from BSD's to slowdowns and memory leaks to straight up broken behavior. The easiest fix is definitely a reboot.
Casually mentioning that he wrote task manager... what a legend. Love your channel Dave!
I just wish task manager had a higher priority when you are trying to get it to open to fix your situation.
It used to, Windows 10 doesn’t seem to have the key combo set as an interrupt anymore
Great video. I loved the pacing as well as information. Short, sweet. and satisfying
Oh, that intro was brilliant.
But what about that sliding cup holder tray?
What about it? Every time I step on the foot pedal, it pops out!
Speaking of memory, my old HP computer’s hard drive stays the same in terms of space as long as I don’t add files. I usually use the browser and I’m always putting it in hibernation mode.
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On the other hand, my newer Apple Air computer every time I use a browser it devours my hard drive space and I have to restart it almost all the time.
Hi Dave, I've been a live long Windows guy, both in the Data Center and for personal use. I'd love to hear your thoughts on if the registry really gets bloated and if that can slow down performance. Also I'd like to hear your same thoughts on C:\Windows\Prefetch and if having to much in prefetch can also slow down your system. Each one of those videos would be worth a coffee mug for me.
Thank you Dave. I love hearing all this stuff and I’m so glad you’re out there to give us this very interesting information!
How about some programming videos for c/c++. A learning series would be awesome. Even down to setup of an IDE would probably help a lot of people.
This seems like a great explanation for people that already understand a whole lot of things about computers.
You are not retired you are just rebooting.
Your invaluable addition to Windows has spared me a great deal of rebooting. I don't know what it is, but just hitting ctrl+shift+esc seems to have an effect like the crack of birch across a teak desk.
Engineer: "Hey, my machine is locked up."
Tech: "Just reboot it."
Engineer: "That's not a fix ... I'm going to lose hours of work."
Tech: "Well, we can reformat your hard drive."
Engineer: "Stay away from my computer."
_Uwa!_ I keep Task Manager minimized to my systray at all times, ready to roll at a moment's notice, such is its glory and utility. Thank you, Dave, for making one of my favorite instruments in the operating system orchestra.
Been awaiting this one... Great :D
Task successfully awaited.
The intro to the video was soo well made!
Just woke up and watched this. I'm now wondering if sleeping is the equivalent of a reboot 🤔
True, we start from a clean short-term memory.
Your brain does a memory refresh/reorder (defrag?) while we sleep. It takes longer than a device restart but it's essential.
^^ Truth! There's a good Radiolab episode about this.
i think so...sometimes (like 1-2 times a year) i get problems to pee i dont know why, after i sleep i can pee normally
As a game dev, I have Unity, VS, Crome, and Task Mannager up at all times. It is surprisingly easy to create an infinite loop in a Start Function without relising it.
Wow !!!! My ears perked up when you said , RingZero .... Due to your background , could you do a video on how in the beginning Windows and OS/2 played together but later on went in different directions . It is my limited understanding , but I was told OS/2 used RingZero differently? What’s the story on how the two operating systems dealt with security and the rings ?
Liked and subscribed
Sure thing!
Nice Video. Always interesting to watch/hear your open informative discussions from your previous life as Microsoft Engineer. :) :)
I used to have a VCR that I swear must have been running Windows Embedded OS. About every 3 months, it would go crazy... Powering Off/On didn't help, because, powering off many devices doesn't actually power them off, they just blank the screen and go into idle mode (a clue is they usually have a clock or some LED lights that stay on...).
When it would go nuts (again, about every 3 months), I would physically unplug it for about 10-20 minutes, plug it back in, and then it would run just fine for another 3 months or so.. What fun. :) :)
You wrote task manager? You are a god in my eyes. Subscribed.
Check out his vids on the story of task manager.
@@toyotasupra97 I have watched some. But thank you for the tip.
i wrote task manager but he never wrote back lol
@@richardcranium5839 haha, good one
Nice to see the man behind task manager. You are a legend sir.
that intro was hilarious!
It has gotten much better. My laptop is nearly 4 years old and still feels like new. Without reinstalling Windows.
What camera do you use? That sharpness is great
Thanks! It's a Sony FX3 with a 50mm Sigma Art f/1.4 lens.
Task manager is definitely the number one app I keep open on my windows machine any time I use it. It helps extend the life of my computers time and again.
"Why does rebooting fix everything"
Too bad it can't fix my marriage, no matter how many times I reboot
Sounds like user error.
Back Up Is Coming ......
Please Wait ....
Just Reloading ..... Shot Gun .
does she feed you spam? on dirty malware? maybe she has a virus. watch out she'll leave you for a logger
Omg I didn't realise you could change to a per-core view in Task Manager before this video! What! So much good info in this video.
"Now, if you'd only clean up the icons on your desktop" 😂😂😂
Dave, good discussion! I have to point out that a "reboot" is loading BIOS. The old systems had just enough ROM to load the floppy driver code. The floppy would "boot" the IO code allowing the system to work with much more complicated disk drives of the day. The operating system would then be "IPL"d or initial program load. Once your operating system loaded, you could run applications. Computers today just map flash memory into the processor's memory space where the processor knows to go when it first turns on. Back in the day it was a lot easier to send a net floppy boot disk than a tube of ROMs and have a tech install them. Now we just download new code from the internet and reflash!
Thanks for the video!
‘Look at how smarter you have become in a few seconds, imagine yourself 11 minutes from now” -LOL
Another thing i would mention is windows updates, unless you check you might not realize that a pending update has been downloaded and was not allowed to install for a while, the way windows stores updates in memory will tend to slow down a machine considerably but is hard to distinguish on task manager
Do "Why sfc /scannow never fixes anything" next!
Sometimes id does.
But it's only checking integrity of main Windows system files while you may get problems elsewhere:
* In your Registry
* In other files
I use it from time to time. It fixes stuff and replaces bad system files when found. It works. Next step is doing dism commands after that :)
@@libb3n shouldn't dism be done first to ensure that the files sfc uses are correct
@@martinlord5969 Not really. I only look into dism cleanup and so on after sfc scannow fails. I also do a sfc scannow in safe mode if it fails just to be sure. Then I execute dism commands to correct the system files that have problems.
I have seen it fix a problem exactly one time. Old Windows 2003 box running Altiris. I have tried it *many* other times with no benefit at all.
10:46 - I run 'hidden icons' on the desktop and have a link to the desktop in the start menu and pinned in explorer. I enjoy a clean desktop, and can use the desktop like any other folder. I love it.
If emerging NVRAM gets more widely spread and integrated in more programs and maybe even system components, we might enter a time where a reboot doesn't fix as many issues as it used to. :D
My introduction to the technical details of Windows came with NT4.0, I later encountered NT3.1 and so gained a retrospective insight, I think NT4.0 is still at the core of today's Windows, a wonderful UNIX inspired operating system, I love it
Hi there! I recall that on older Windows versions, the task manager had an option to kill an entire process tree. This option doesn't seem to exist any longer in my Windows 10 version. Any idea why that changed? To be honest though, I never felt the need to use that option. Killing only the non-responding process always did the trick for me.
It does exist in mine, check in the Details tab
Thank you for Task Manager, it has helped me shutdown many programs that I would have otherwise never known were using resources.
"Nefarious Canadian Vowels". Being Canadian, I laughed. :)
Curse "U" Canada! haha :-D
I'd be offended. Not your fault the southerners can't spell :)
British English is the same!
Thing is, you Canadian's stole them from us Brits, lol
@@PeterMaddison2483 Last I checked, you Brits are still the boss of us. But my history ended in grade 9, some 25+ years ago.
The process of computer startup has been know by several other terms in addition to booting. Some I have learned over the decades are: dead start, cold start, warm start, daily start and IPL (Initial Program Load).
Wow, I didn't know Canadia also spelled colour and cheque correctly 👍🏻😃
Also, _centre_ , _marvellous_ , _counselling_ (notice the double-l) etc. Tha Canada air leth math.
All the colonies do.
Except Australia, they’re a bit hit & miss.
@@tambow44 Eh?!! Maaaaaaate, wot do you mean?
How about car terms; boot vs. trunk, and hood vs. bonnet - which ones are used in Canadia?
Canadians pretend to be British to be tsundere towards Americans
So much history and personal experience to unpack. I've worked with computers in one form or another since 1974. I'm on the spectrum as well, so thanks for raising awareness.
IMHO, one of the advantages of vendors of microcomputer products was that most non-IT-pro users had no initial expectations of system stability or uptime. This allowed hardware, OS and end-user software developers to get away with delivering products that focused more on "more features to market faster" than stability that in a commercial setting would have been unacceptable.
As a former IT professional tasked with deploying and supporting products in Microsoft's ecosystems from MS-DOS onwards, I often railed at Microsoft's apparent willingness to avoid the hard work of "root cause analysis" in favor of the "just reboot it and everything will be fine" approach. It's truly sad (and more than a little frustrating) that Microsoft appears to be OK in adhering to this philosophy to the present day.
My experience with "grown-up" commercial operating systems (while not trouble-free) were accompanied by vendor support aligned with an expectation of stability / high uptime. I left the Microsoft ecosystem for FOSS long ago and despite its own growing pains, it has achieved levels of reliability and functionality that Microsoft could have achieved decades ago.
These days, I only run Windows in a virtual machine that gets rolled back to a stable snapshot after every use. I don't need antivirus or any of the other crap-ware foisted on users by the hardware OEM's, so it's lean and fast. My Linux environment on a Threadripper 3960 with redundant SSD arrays runs the ZFS file system and gives me all of the things I wish Microsoft have provided with Windows NT 4.0.
How about a quick session to talk about the Stuxnet virus? Since that used a few flaws / design decisions, I would love to hear your thougths on the topic.
Or, since it's in the news and has negatively affected 1/4 of the country, how about a word on the Ransomware, uh, "virus?" "Malware?" "Attackware?"
@@wirenutt57 A general windows security session would be better. How to better protect your system. But, I would still love to hear Daves thoughts on the mechanisms that enabled Stuxnet to infect the computers to that degree. Ofcourse, a similar talk about the ransomwares in general could also be nice.
"Have you tried turning it off and back on again" is absolutely the first step in just about everything. It recently fixed my oven when it was getting too hot and my TV when it had no sound.