A More Reliable Task Manager | The Coffeehouse

tfraser

The other day my system encountered a full freeze where I wasn't able to access Windows Task Manager, therefore making a reboot the only solution. With the crash-catching and application recovery improvements in Windows Vista this doesn't happen often, but when it does it's a real pain.

This got me wondering whether WTM could be made a more reliable way of rescuing the OS. I'm thinking of something where a small section of the CPU and RAM resources could be permanently reserved for use by WTM in the event of a freeze. This way WTM can still be started and used to trim some troublesome processes to restore Windows to a functioning state. I'm aware that the resource requirements of WTM vary based on other currently running processes, but surely calculating this would not be overly complex.

The concept seems so obvious to me that I'm certain Windows already has something similar, though if the feature does indeed exist it clearly isn't working the way it should. What are your thoughts on it? Do you think it would be useful or viable?

jonathansampson
stick a scissor in you eye!

I love the idea. I must admit, I don't think I've ever experienced a full lock-up in Vista. If I have, it's rare. But experiences aside, in principle I would like to be assured that if I ever did experience one I would be able to escape the death-grip. I work on a lot of client-projects at home, and I don't like the idea of my computer having the ability to lock-up and require a hard restart.

ZippyV
Fired Up

I don't think it's a problem with task manager itself but rather a combination of events that lead to this situation. Probably a kernel driver that stops responding and starts locking up the system.

tfraser

In reply to ZippyV

#Oct 4th, 2008 @ 11:30 AM

I'm not suggesting that WTM is causing the freezes; rather I'm thinking that unintentional hard reboots could be prevented by ensuring WTM can be accessed regardless of what state the rest of the OS is in.

It needs to be run in a process cycle separate from the rest of the applications and services on the computer so that in the event of a freeze their problems won't affect how it operates.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

In reply to tfraser

#Oct 4th, 2008 @ 11:08 PM

The problem, I think, is that hard freezes are usually related to hardware or driver problems, and even if you were to run the task manager in a virtualized machine (which seems to be what you're suggesting here), it won't necessarily be able to do anything to help.

turrican
Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance! - Albert Einstein

In reply to Yggdrasil

#Oct 4th, 2008 @ 11:38 PM

hm... yeah. Maybe they could put a restriction on the CPU usage of ALL windows apps, like not allowing them to EVER go above 99%, this way we'll always have a liiiiitttle extra juice to get to task manager when things start to freeze.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Hmm... usually when the TaskManager doesn't come up anymore you have a serious problem. The problem is not solvable with just killing a task. If that would be possible the system wouldn't go down. Therefore enabling this doesn't change much. Other than that the Taskmanager would need to implement all the UI stuff on its own, or otherwise you would need to load a lot of other crap in that "safe" zone.

BHpaddock

In reply to littleguru

#Oct 5th, 2008 @ 12:10 AM

Task Manager is just an app, I don't think it gets any special treatment really.

If you do get in a spot where Task Manager won't run, you should still be able to press Ctrl+Alt+Del and get the Winlogon security screen, and you should be able to choose the "Log Off" option to log out your account and get out of that state without power cycling the machine.

Basically, Windows already has the sort of background process that can't be pre-empted, but it isn't Task Manager, it's the session manager and logon UI.