OK, it’s not really Taskman, but sort of related. Task Manager is one of the admin’s or power user’s favorite tools. In Vista’s Taskman you can see from this pic below there are two easily discernible differences.

One difference is the ‘Services’ tab. In Windows XP you had all the other tabs, and the ‘Processes’ tab was probably your favorite, now your time will likely be split between Processes which contains most of the info you were looking for before, and the Services tab shows all services on the box, the parent group it’s a part of, the current state (Running, Stopped) and the process ID number. In Services, if you bring up the context menu for a service you can try to stop it, or you can ‘Go to Process’ which will take you to the owning process for this service in the Processes tab. Cool.

OK, that was one difference, here’s the second. See the button below ‘Resource Monitor’? Click it (ok, if you’re running Vista, go click it :smile:), this launches the Resource Monitor tool you can see farther below…

The Resource Monitor tool is new in Vista. It’s also known by the more cumbersome ‘Reliability and Performance Monitor”. This is the tool you wished you had in the box for XP or Win2k3, it’s like a poor man’s Perfmon with realtime data but no logging capability that I can find in it.

Besides launching it from Taskman you can also get to it:

• From the ‘computer’ context menu under ‘Manage’
• You can go to “Start - system tools - Reliability and Performance”
• Or from a CMD window you can type ‘perfmon /res‘

This tool can track and allow you to monitor all activities for CPU, Disk, Network & Memory.

Under CPU, not only do you get the typical ‘PID’, process, # threads, but also see ‘Average CPU’ usage.

For Disk, you can view read and write in B/Min, IO Priority and Response Time.

For Network you can view the net address a process is connected to or using and the Send/Rec/Total B/min.

Lastly, Memory shows process/PID, Hard Faults/min, Commit/Working Set/Shareable/Private memory usage.

I missed this one a few weeks ago. Wowwee is licensing the likeness of Spiderman to deliver Spidersapien. Want to see it in action? Watch the video on Youtube.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s the Homersapien further below as well. Want one? Try Gadgetshop, they also have much more detail on the ‘Spidey’ specs.

Feeling like your SUV blends into the crowd? In need of something to transport your groceries by day and a mobile party or arsenal by night? Meet the Badonkadonk, a one-of-a-kind “armored land cruiser/recreational tank”.

To look at it, one might think it’s a hovercraft, but in fact it runs on four off-road wheels, concealed by a unique industrial-strength rubberized flexible skirt that shields and protects the wheels to within an inch of the ground, while still allowing for enough flex to give clearance over bumpy and uneven terrain.

It looks like something out of Mad Max.

If you’re looking for a unique memory stick, look no further. On sale through oooms.nl or from one of their partner stores listed here. Get them in various flash sizes and different species of fine natural wood.

I built out a new PC last weekend and promptly installed Vista Ultimate. The next night I needed Adobe Reader so i started making my way to adobe.com to get the latest version. As i was loading their site I thought back to the RC build and the trouble i had installing Reader then, you had to hack it in because of several problems with its installer.

Lo and behold, Reader has the same problem with this Vista RTM build. What the heck? It’s not like Longhorn/Vista hasn’t been available for ISVs to actually *test* on at some point in the last couple of years and be prepared! What gives?

So I had to hack the sucker in again.
What I wound up doing was run the installer up to the point where the MSI failed. Before acknowledging the error and allowing it to rollback the setup, i quickly drilled down to the user folder: ‘C:\Users\Andy\AppData\LocalLow\Netopsystems\temp‘ , copied out the Adobe temp folder to the desktop, then acknowledged the error so it could clean up and remove the temp files in original temp folder path above.

Then i ran the MSI within the copied version of the Adobe folder now on my desktop and this time the installation worked fine.

Ah well, at least it had a happy ending and we have Reader goodness on the box now. It turned out that the installer couldn’t handle UAC being turned off on the box afterall.