The original Task Manager (that program you only ever open when something has gone wrong in your rig) originally launched way back in 1995. Now, 31 years later, its creator has put out a follow-up. About time, I know.
Dave Plummer, former Microsoft Engineer turned YouTuber turned guy who really wants you to know he made Task Manager, has just released Task Manager OG, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Plummer says he wrote a 107-page spec, fed it to Claude, and then partly vibe-coded this new program while their kid was getting surgery.
“By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he’s all better now—but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed.”
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Now, with much better hardware than users had back in the 90s, Plummer wanted a Task Manager that would “push the limits.” The sequel software animates at 60 Hz and provides data like mouse tracking and a summary page. It is also, by default, covered in neon and very high contrast, which Plummer says, “My autism leads me to embrace”
My first thought upon downloading it was ‘damn, this is really ugly’. My second thought was ‘this app does not need visual bloom’. Good start then?
(Image credit: Dave Plummer)
On top of that, the reading in Task Manager and Task Manager OG are simply different. My Chrome tabs came in at close to 11 GB on TMOG and just above 8 GB on Task Manager. Slack registered 1 GB on TMOG and 500 MB on Task Manager. These are pretty significantly different readings. Interestingly, both Task Manager and TMOG gave the same overall memory usage stats. Task Manager said 68%, and TMOG said 21.7 GB, which is around 68% of the 32 GB in my rig.
By default, Task Manager OG hogs up slightly more resources than the Task Manager pre-installed on my machine (around 120 Mb of memory versus 105 MB, and 3-4% of CPU usage versus just under 1%), but turning off high-frequency visuals does cut the CPU usage down to around 2-3% for me. That means, either way, TMOG is more intensive than Task Manager. To be fair, Plummer does say as such in his announcement, though the irony isn’t lost on me that one would replace Task Manager with something that hogs more resources.
I then went into the performance tab, which shows your CPU, memory, and GPU running, alongside your internet. TMOG has added CPU power and thermals modules, which Task Manager doesn’t. But CPU power failed to show CPU power and thermals gave a consistent 16.9°C (62.42°F ), but fails to say what is being measured. That temperature is lower than the room the PC is in, so it’s likely not actually reading anything.
HWinfo was capable of grabbing CPU power readings and all kinds of temps, so it seems unlikely the issue is a hardware one here.
The CPU performance tab does have tracking on different cores, plus clock speed, which is a level of default granularity I like, but also something available Task Manager by simply right-clicking on CPU and then hitting “Logical Processors.”
Though I’m not a fan of the TMOG look in its default mode, you can change colours and bloom—that done, I actually quite like the layout. I can understand why a power user might want access to CPU, GPU, and memory performance on one page, alongside thermals and power usage. As well as that, the CPU overview has a neat function where the start of the graph is measured in seconds and the end of the graph in much longer intervals. This means you can get a second-by-second readout, but also a decent long-term one on the same graph.
As of right now, a lot of the app’s most unique features are only available to those who have the paid pro version, but you can’t actually get pro yet, as the software is still in beta. Pro gets you a large HWinfo-style readout of power and frequency over your whole computer, plus a readout of installed apps, a layout of connected apps alongside their versions and estimated size, plus a disk space reader. There’s also a set of benchmarks.
But alas, you can get pretty much everything here from a combination of Task Manager and the likes of Hardware Info. Mac has its own version of Task Manager too, and Linux has the likes of Htop and NVTOP to do the same job. TMOG seems to be more about convenience rather than offering something other apps can’t, and of course there’s that funky colour scheme too. There’s part of me that wants to cynically point at the whole ‘vibe coding’ thing and say ‘well, could have guessed that’, but also this is a beta program that admits to being a beta program. Mistakes and errors are to be expected.
One thing I do like about TMOG is that, looking at Plummer’s Twitter, they do seem to respond positively to feedback and want to implement changes based on what users like. That’s certainly a boon, and something Microsoft gets a lot of flak for with its own apps.
Whether or not the pro mode will be worth the money is anyone’s guess, but you can’t buy it yet even if you wanted to. All I can say is I’m good with plain ‘ol Task Manager and HWinfo for now.
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