Original Task Manager creator explains why it lies to you about CPU usage — former Microsoft engineer shows unique solution to a seemingly simple, but actually

Original Task Manager creator explains why it lies to you about CPU usage — former Microsoft engineer shows unique solution to a seemingly simple, but actually

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He\u2019s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he\u2019s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-20/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jowi Morales Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

DS426 Good article and I enjoy watching Dave Plummer's videos, but I think something important that should have been mentioned was left out: Task Manager doesn't calculate CPU usage this way as of July 2025's Windows 11 Patch Tuesday updates. " Task Manager will now calculate CPU usage differently for Processes, Performance, and Users pages. It will use standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and align with industry standards and third-party tools. To ensure backward compatibility, an optional column named CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab, showing the previous CPU value from the Processes page." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/july-8-2025-kb5062553-os-build-26100-4652-0e8c636a-7712-4936-9c76-ece21a38cf9a Cheers. Reply

oofdragon Tldr..the guy who did it actually didn't know how to do it, so what you see is just fake Reply

helper800 Why not just show the percentage as a function of current CPU power draw divided by CPU TDP? I have always looked at power draw to get an idea of how much my CPU and graphics card was actually doing. Reply

Bonaducci I've made something similar for performance tracking on embedded system (linux of course) and the most challenging part was keeping readings of all thread CPU usage in sync. It's impossible with many threads, as each thread statistics are captured separately and the program doing this is sharing the CPU with the rest of the system. What I did is that each thread reports CPU usage averaged since the last time it was read and even though they are organized in frames, they have some time shifts. This means that when you sum all thread CPU usage, it will be different from total. It's a problem you can't really solve unless you make something specific in the kernel to dump them all at once. Reply

UPI666 Why should we care what this fraud, scammer says? He lied to 100.000's of people and tried sell them scam software with his SoftwareOnline company. Reply

wakuwaku DS426 said: Good article and I enjoy watching Dave Plummer's videos, but I think something important that should have been mentioned was left out: Task Manager doesn't calculate CPU usage this way as of July 2025's Windows 11 Patch Tuesday updates. " Task Manager will now calculate CPU usage differently for Processes, Performance, and Users pages. It will use standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and align with industry standards and third-party tools. To ensure backward compatibility, an optional column named CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab, showing the previous CPU value from the Processes page." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/july-8-2025-kb5062553-os-build-26100-4652-0e8c636a-7712-4936-9c76-ece21a38cf9a Cheers. You should've linked to an article explaining what it all meant. Heck you should've read an explanatory article that explained it. Because if you did, you would know that technically they didn't change the way CPU usage was calculated, they just took into account the number of CPU cores the CPU has and divided the CPU usage of a process against that. This was already used in the Performance section of the Task Manager. They just standardized the rest of the Task Manager that didn't align with the Performance section. Here is what came up on my google, but feel free to provide better sources if you find any. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2794951/windows-11-now-uses-a-smarter-cpu-usage-number-in-task-manager.html https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/03/01/windows-11-standardizes-task-managers-cpu-usage-calculation-aligns-with-industry/ UPI666 said: Why should we care what this fraud, scammer says? He lied to 100.000's of people and tried sell them scam software with his SoftwareOnline company. Because Mr Tom is not yet a millionaire and could use all the SEO help he could get from all the millionaires, and billionaires… and trillionaires…. Reply

Chokkymalk oofdragon said: Tldr..the guy who did it actually didn't know how to do it, so what you see is just fake (Because it was the 90s when he was tasked with these projects) Reply

TerryLaze helper800 said: Why not just show the percentage as a function of current CPU power draw divided by CPU TDP? I have always looked at power draw to get an idea of how much my CPU and graphics card was actually doing. Because you can have badly acting apps/code that soft lock your cpu with minimal power draw, you can have close to zero ability to execute code with very minimal power draw. And you can have power virus code that hammers a special function of the CPU maxing out the power draw while still being able to run stuff on the rest of the CPU. Also TDP for any CPU is somewhere in the middle of the max power draw, ryzen has a PPT 30-40% ABOVE tdp. You would get CPU usage of 140% ,try explaining that to your average customer. Reply

Co BIY TerryLaze said: You would get CPU usage of 140% ,try explaining that to your average customer. The concept of duty cycle and what it means is foreign to most people as is reading the manual/documentation for anything let alone something as complicated as a PC. The stat I would be interested in hearing from Microsoft and the one I'm sure drives their decisions is what percentage of users have ever opened task manager, especially for anything other than canceling a frozen application at the instruction of support. Reply

vinay2070 TerryLaze said: Because you can have badly acting apps/code that soft lock your cpu with minimal power draw, you can have close to zero ability to execute code with very minimal power draw. And you can have power virus code that hammers a special function of the CPU maxing out the power draw while still being able to run stuff on the rest of the CPU. Also TDP for any CPU is somewhere in the middle of the max power draw, ryzen has a PPT 30-40% ABOVE tdp. You would get CPU usage of 140% ,try explaining that to your average customer. Back in the days (over a decade or 2 ago), I remember using a cpu cooler software. When executed, it reduced the temp of the CPU while the CPU usage skyrocketed. I think it ran some instructions that were less stressing than the idle instuctions or something of that sort. Shows why power draw cannot be used for this purpose. Reply

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