Dave Plummer Has Made the Task Manager of Your Dreams

Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has published an impressive and modern Task Manager replacement called Task Manager OG (TMOG). It runs on Windows 11, Windows 11 on Arm, macOS, and Linux, and it’s available in free and paid versions. And you definitely want to check it out.

“Over 30 years ago, I wrote the original Windows Task Manager,” Plummer explains on the TMOG website. “Now I’ve built TMOG to help you spot what’s slowing down your computer—and understand why. One clear view, whether you run Windows, macOS, or Linux.”

You may know Plummer from his amazing YouTube channel. I subscribe and watch every video, and at the very least be sure to check out his incredible 3+ hour interview with NT architect David Cutler. His technical takes on personal computing are always interesting, but Plummer has never really stopped coding. And TMOG, a modern take on Task Manager, might be his most interesting project yet.

TMOG offers the same basic views as the Task Manager in Windows 11, albeit sorted in a different order and with a much nicer presentation: Performance, Processes, App history, Startup apps, Users, and Services are all accounted for, plus Plummer adds a nice Summary view as a home page of sorts and a System info view that’s similar to the legacy System Information control panel. But there are also several addition views available to those who pay $39.95 for Task Manager OG Pro: Power & freq, Flight Recorder, Connections, Installed Apps, Drivers, Disk Space, and Benchmarks.

Plummer says that TMOG is 100 percent native code–C++/Win32 on Windows, Swift and AppKit on Mac, and C++/QT6 on Linux–with new web views or Electron in sight. It lets you find out what just happened if your computer’s performance dropped, fans kicked on, or the battery is draining faster than expected, and

“Task Manager OG is basically every idea I’ve had over the decades that I ‘should’ have thought of the first time around, plus a lot of functionality that just wasn’t practical back in the day,” he told me via email.

Very interesting. You can learn more and download the free version on the TMOG website.