One account, when the task manager is started the outside frame, menus, and tabs are missing. On a different account they are there. Any body know why this would happen?

Double-click it.

double-click it somewhere not in the titebar, menu, or process list

Huh. I never knew that. Weird.

It is clearly one of those odd ball features that some developer thinks it neat and no one notices before it is too late to take it out.

Yeah, that bit me unexpectedly a few months back. Drove me nuts. Thank goodness for Google Groups.

> oddball features

Not having seen the behavior, how is a badly drawn window a feature?

-brendan

Not having seen the behavior, how is a badly drawn window a feature?

Because it allows you to have a James Bond villian's computer style full screen display of just the CPU activity graph. Someone at MSFT clearly thought it was cool, back in the days of NT3.1 (or was it there IBM's code before that ?)

Actually, I find it useful. Sometimes I want to have the cpu graph while I'm working (always on top) but the entire window takes up way too much space. Solution? Dbl-click the task manager and make it about the size of three horizontally aligned postage stamps, then move it out of the way.

Sure, there are third party utilities that can do that but this is built in.

how is a badly drawn window a feature?

Because it's not "badly drawn":

I'll be go to ....

I was having problems with a process that wanted more than 2GB. Everything was slow. I might have clicked several times trying to get a responce. Then they all caught up, just about when I pulled the plug. Gaaahhh.

Thanks yn0t_

I thought hitting ESC did the same trick, but alas, that's in the old Win9x "System Monitor".

While we're on the topic of monitoring tools, is there any bundled Win2k tool like ol' System Monitor?

SysMon lets me choose which graphs I want to see AND can be so compact, I can keep it always open in the bottom corner of my screen. So, it shows me CPU load, Free memory (which is kind of useless), Bytes read/sec, and Bytes written/sec. Very handy for all kinds of stuff.

I know I could use an MMC snap-in that shows the resources, but it's not quite as compact as ol' SysMon. Are there any other utilities that could monitor those four simple things AND stay tucked in a tiny window on my screen? Thanks.

Win2k tool like ol' System Monitor?

PerfMon. It's System Monitor on steroids.