Most people spend about 80 percent
of their time (based on Microsoft’s telemetry-based research) using the
Processes tab of the Task Manager. But there’s much more to be learned
about your system on the remaining tabs. The two next most important
tabs are Performance and App History. Performance shows you a real-time
graph of your system’s four main resource components: CPU (processor),
memory, disk, and network .
Figure 1. The utilization rates of each core in a four-core CPU
If you look closely at Figure 1,
you will see that all four cores are loaded at about the same levels,
but that all of the curves are unique. This illustrates one of the
important “under the hood” features of Windows 8. Microsoft rewrote the
operating system so that it fully utilizes all cores during run times.
That’s one of the reasons that Windows 8 starts up more quickly than
Windows 7, and why its systems are more responsive. It’s an important
advance.
Notice also that there is a link to the Resource Manager on the Performance tab. Basically, Resource Manager is a fancier version of the Performance display; it lets you isolate individual factors one at at time or by group.
Resource Manager is a more advanced performance diagnostic tool than Task Manager.
Although the Performance tab provides immediate feedback, the information you see on the App History tab
is endlessly fascinating. In its heat map display, you can learn which
apps have been running since statistics were measured. The display
lists tile-based apps and websites.
App History shows how long tile-based apps and websites have been open.
Tip
The context menus of objects on the
Performance tab let you hide information and switch to a summary
display, as well as copy what you see so you can store a record
elsewhere.
