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TIP: Task Manager Shortcuts

Sun, November 16, 2008, 01:10 AM under AboutPresenting
In my demos more often than not I bring up task manager (e.g. so I can show the CPU utilization). If you do the same, here are 4 tips.

1. Ctrl+Shift+ESC brings it up (no need to right click on taskbar and select the Task Manager menuitem)

2. On the Performance (or Networking) tab, double click anywhere to maximize that area (as per the screenshot on left). One of the advantages is that now the window can be resized to be much smaller than what it can be otherwise; plus you can focus more clearly without the other clutter. Double click again to restore or click and drag to move the window around.

3. If you want to point out something interesting in the "CPU Usage" and "CPU Usage History", just hold down the Ctrl key to PAUSE the dynamic updating of the graphs. Release the Ctrl key to resume the refreshing.

4. Change the refresh speed to HIGH
Comments [5] |#Permalink
Sunday, November 16, 2008 9:14:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Anonymous tip: I bring up the task manager by pressing ctrl+alt+delete and then clicking on Task Manager button. This way, I am checking the exact logon date and time.
Anonymous
Sunday, November 16, 2008 12:13:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
awesome! Ctrl Shift Esc!! How come I didnt know about this!!!
bangoker
Sunday, November 16, 2008 2:06:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Have you seen Process Explorer? It is a replacement for the Task Manager that will do cool things like show a performance graph on a specific process.

It supports all of the short-cuts you mentioned, so we use it on all of our servers and developer machines.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Jonathan Allen
Monday, November 17, 2008 9:23:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
If you click on memory usage, it expands only those two and cpu usage is no where on screen.
Tanveer Badar
Friday, November 21, 2008 4:47:21 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
bangoker: Glad you found it useful!

Anonymous: Sorry, I don't follow.

Tanveer: Sorry, I can't repro.

Jonathan: Yes I have, thanks for sharing the link though, this is useful for others. In the context of presentations, I try to use only things that ship out of the box. Crazy and limiting I know, but that is just my quirky presentation style :)
Daniel Moth
Comments are closed.