Microsoft refines the Task Manager in Windows 11

Apr 29, 2022 20:18 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft keeps refining the Task Manager in Windows 11, and the most recent preview build shipped as part of the Windows Insider program comes with additional improvements on this front.

More specifically, Microsoft has added a change that was spotted earlier this month in a Windows Insider podcast, so the Task Manager now sports accent colors based on your settings on the operating system.

“We’ve updated the Processes page in Task Manager so that the colors used in the heatmap are now based on your accent color. Please note in certain cases we will use the default blue accent color to ensure readability. We did a demo of this during this month’s Windows Insider webcast featuring Claton Hendricks from the Task Manager Team – watch the webcast on-demand here,” Microsoft explains.

Task Manager in Windows 11

Microsoft is continuously focusing on making the Task Manager a modern tool in the operating system. For example, Task Manager now sports a dark mode in Windows 11 preview builds, as well as more information that comes in handy to all users.

“Last April, we experimented with a new feature called “Eco mode” in Task Manager and we’re bringing this back with a new brand name: Efficiency mode. This feature is helpful when you notice an app consuming high resources and would like to limit its consumption so that the system gives priority to other apps which will lead to faster foreground responsiveness and better energy efficiency,” Microsoft explained earlier this year when it rolled out the new feature.

“You can only apply Efficiency mode to single process and not to the entire group process.  If the option is grey out, it generally means that it’s a core Windows process and throttling it might affect the performance of the system. The Efficiency mode process will be marked with a new leaf icon, and we are also introducing new pause icon for Suspended process to indicate the process is in suspended mode.”

At this point, all these improvements are exclusive to insiders, but they should start rolling out to production devices later this year.