fuck you task manager (with irrational rage-y goodness)

Bastard goat raping program. Okay here’s the story:

Prologue, some time in the past (most likely the dark ages):

Microsoft employee: Hey lets NOT make task manager halt all other programs when it runs. That way if a program goes haywire and DoSes the computer, while you’re working there’s nothing you can do except sit there and watch for a good 3 or 4 or 5 minutes… on up to a few galactic rotations while the task manager slow redraws, or do a force restart and loose what you were working on.

Other Microsoft employee: great idea, hey you up for some goat raping?

Microsoft employee: nah I’m just going to beat these kittens, hey we still up for torching the orphanage later?

Other Microsoft employee: You know it.

Present day Michigan:

I just spent an hour fighting with the infernal task manager to figure out which program was DoSing me. I could have did it in 2 or 3 minutes but some deranged programmer with diseased pig bile for brains decided that instead of making the task manager halt the system, like in windows 9x, windows NT based system’s task manager wouldn’t. Restarting wasn’t an option because of dataloss. So I had to sit and endure that sadistic program’s taunts of only showing windows one lethargic piece at a time. Like it thought it was some kind of strip tease wooooo hard drive cranking is so sensual.

Anyway the rage is drained from my system but I think I still owe microsoft this:

Fuck you with the largest pointiest stick from the painfull fuck tree, and may that stick have on it’s end rubbing alcohol, chill peppers, and stuffed dead hedgehog.

eh it’s not the same, should have written the material down when I was mad, oh well.

So keeping in mind the stuff above is hyperbole, what do computers do to tick you off?

I’m so looking in my next seed catalog for a sapling of this variety.

It’s Latin name is fuckis ouchmyasseth if that helps.

Nice rant, but I’m not completely sure your requested solution to this problem is reasonable. As the Windows NT platform is their server platform I would think it is a Very Bad Idea to have something as simple as opening the Task Manager halt all the running applications, bringing a realtime system to it’s knees while you try to shut down a misbehaving Windows Explorer issue.

Perhaps they need to have this as a setting for home users?

I have a gripe against Windows that looks very similar to yours, and that is the writers of Windows Explorer and their complete lack of understanding of multithreading! Really, it made sense to you to lock up completely so I cannot browse the C: drive while you desperately try and connect to externally mapped drives that probably aren’t there because my laptop isn’t in the office? Here, have a banana and go play in a tree!

An appropriate .wav file

I have nothing to add, except that this made me laugh a lot.

Oh I hate that. One tiny unoticeable scratch in a cd can bring everything to halt. Deep in the computer there must logic cuircut that goes something like this:

instruction at address FF49A32: OMG OMG OMG OMG BAD CD CD BAD CDEEE STOP WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO?
Until a random device driver slaps it around and says “get ahold of yourself man!”
I was thinking about the halt issue. Freezing the server would be a problem. Maybe a halt button on task manager.

takes a bow

I was thinking something closer to this.

Um. wow.

Who else is hoping this guy ponies up the registration fee?

Well done.

You, sir, are going in my quote file. Bravo!

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del and then select TaskMgr from that 6-button dialog. This process will respond more quickly than starting TaskMgr any other way (even quicker than opening and already-running TaskMgr). Once TaskMgr is running, use the tabs to figure out who has the CPU pegged or is “Not Responding”. Then use File->New Task to launch a cmd window and kill the process from the command-line. There are command-line kills in cygwin and the Windows resource kit. The cygwin one usually works better.

Now having said that, it really bugs me that Windows takes so long to kill a process (and even fails some times). I realize it is trying to play nice and let the process clean up its resources – and the app could be blocked on a kernel resources. But if I, the mighty user, tell the OS to stop a process – then stop the fucking process. I don’t care if it cleans up or even if it is actually killed. Just stop giving it freaking CPU time.

Can we have a collection to pay the OP’s registration? We need more rants like that.

I really feel your pain about Windows’ stupid network naivety and Explorer’s dumb single-threadedness. I feel that underneath, it still thinks it’s single-user single-threaded DOS, and all this stuff about threads, fibers, processes, context switching and preemptive multitasking is just smoke and mirrors. (Disclosure: I’m a Windows programmer and MCSD [pointless piece of paper that is - but for another rant.])

I even opened a thread about this stuff a while back:

Oh yeah. One of my home PCs has currently got one zombie Thunderbird window, one zombie IE window and one zombie Opera window open. Nothing that TaskManager can do will make a dent in them. It offers the pointless whiny ‘would you like to report an error’ dialog, then nothing. The only way to get rid of these damn windows is to reboot. And since this pc is scanning a 250Gb hard disk at the cluster level prior to hopefully recovering some data (thou shalt NOT format the wrong disk :smack: ) and has so far taken over a week to get to about 80%, that’s not an option. Where the hell is the MS equivalent of kill -9 when you need it?

Not by MS, but this kills pretty much anything, even things that Task Manager won’t.

Have you tried killing the process “dumpprep.exe”? That usually works when processes aren’t killed the first time and I’m given that little inane “report this error” window.

I feel your pain.

Try changing your TCP/IP configuration on a Mac when you’ve got network volumes mounted on the damn Desktop —

Old Creaky MacOS 8 (Classic AppleShare): no problemo, do whatever you want with TCP/IP, all those AppleTalk volumes are still right there!

MacOS 9 (AppleShare over IP): Immediate: ”The volume ‘Server Drive’ cannot be used because I can’t find it no more”. (drive icon immediately disappears from Desktop)

MacOS X (AppleShare over IP): ::beachball:: ::beachball:: ::beachball:: ::beachball:: <oh c’mon, give it up already, you aren’t gonna find that volume any more> ::beachball:: ::beachball:: <eighteen minutes later> ”The volume ‘Server Drive’ cannot be used because I can’t find it no more”.

Fortunately, you can always force-quit the Finder. Except. When you’ve changed the bloody IP address because you’re leaving work and heading home and after doing so you opted to shut down. Now computer is in mid-shutdown, the GUI has been put to bed, you can’t force-quit anything or even invoke a damn terminal window, but the computer isn’t going to shut down for 18 minutes. Oh well, we can always Command-Control-PowerKey and restart and fsck-y the poor disk to make sure it’s ok and boot and shut down. By which point it’s 18 minutes later anyhow. Yay progress.

DarrenS recommended the best and easiest to install killer. You can also download the cygwin tools and get an actual Unix compatible kill. Or you can download the Win2k resource kit and use its tlist.exe/kill.exe programs. All of these are free too.

On the OP issue, MS should remove the (apparently) purely decorative “End Task Now” button if it purpose is just to tease us. As best put above:

Amen. .
Oh, and do I really need my Temporary Internet Files in 5 invisible folders named after gibberish… and that are in turn *&^%$ system-locked? Who came up with that?

…how come it is possible for me to have a 0-byte file in my C Drive that I cannot delete? “cannot read from source file or disk”… then how the hell is it that you keep telling me it’s there?

I forgot to mention - XP does have the command-line tool ‘taskkill’ ( taskkill /help for syntax) But for sheer “kill -9”-ness, nothing beats pskill. Anything else is like trying to “cut down the mightiest tree in the forrest…with this herring!”

So, Ren and Stimpy are behind Windows? Things begin to fall into place…

Great rant.

Somewhere, Dave Cutler is crying.