2 Task Managers Running

[Rain08]

So for some reason two task managers decided to run. Every time I start a PC, I always start TM, HWMonitor and Bandicam. It happened when I was manually ending the process of "prbf2.exe" since it takes a long time to close by itself because I only have 2 GB of RAM. What I did is (TM was still open) do the ctrl+alt+delete and clicked Start Task Manager. After doing it, I manually ended the process and after going to the desktop, I then saw both TM running. The graph under the Performance tab isn't synced with one another; they're also not reading each others usage immediately. I noticed this when I was pressing F5 and that causes some CPU usage for TM.

 

[bigmck]

Are you manually starting the three programs or do they start automatically when you start your PC?

 

[Rain08]

Are you manually starting the three programs or do they start automatically when you start your PC?

I start those three programs manually. The only thing that starts automatically is Rainmeter, Rocketdock and uTorrent. The notifications also say that 2 TM's are running.

 

[bigmck]

When you hit ctrl, alt, delete does a menu come up with "Start Task Manager" on it? One click on it will start the TM. == Why are you running TM? The only time I use it is when a program is Not Responding. I then use TM to close the program. Why do you use it when you start?

 

[LMiller7]

By design only one instance of Task Manager can run at a time. There are a number of ways that this can be prevented but under certain rare conditions this could go wrong. I don't know the specifics because Microsoft does not document the internal operation of it's utilities.

Other than that I see nothing unusual. Aside from the CPU graphs and numbers both show identical values. There is no synchronization between them as neither has knowledge the other exists, or even that they can exist. The graph data comes from snapshots of CPU usage taken at regular intervals. But as the data is constantly changing and the timing of the snapshots is different the graphs can look quite different. I have seen this with other utilities.

The 2 instances are reversed in the process listing but that is easily explained. When process names are identical sorting is done by process PID, which is not shown by default.

 

[Rain08]

When you hit ctrl, alt, delete does a menu come up with "Start Task Manager" on it? One click on it will start the TM. == Why are you running TM? The only time I use it is when a program is Not Responding. I then use TM to close the program. Why do you use it when you start?

Yes, a menu comes up. Is it the that let's you choose: Lock this computer, Switch User, Log Off, Change a password, Start Task Manager? That's the one that appears. And yes, one click on Start TM will start it. I have it open since I want to monitor the RAM usage of the programs plus the usage of the network. I also already have it running since if a program uses too much RAM, the menu takes a while to open.

Edit:

By design only one instance of Task Manager can run at a time. There are a number of ways that this can be prevented but under certain rare conditions this could go wrong. I don't know the specifics because Microsoft does not document the internal operation of it's utilities.

Other than that I see nothing unusual. Aside from the CPU graphs and numbers both show identical values. There is no synchronization between them as neither has knowledge the other exists, or even that they can exist. The graph data comes from snapshots of CPU usage taken at regular intervals. But as the data is constantly changing and the timing of the snapshots is different the graphs can look quite different. I have seen this with other utilities.

The 2 instances are reversed in the process listing but that is easily explained. When process names are identical sorting is done by process PID, which is not shown by default.

About that PID, I've noticed that they're both different; one is around at 1000~1500 and the other is at 4000~4300. Unfortunately, I accidentally clicked "Show processes from all users" then one of the TM closed before I can take a screenshot.

 

[LMiller7]

The PID is an arbitrary number used to uniquely identify a process and assigned when it starts. After a process terminates it's PID will eventually be recycled and assigned to another process. I have occasionally seen a PID over 10,000 and apparently has exceed 300,000 on a busy server.